As other have already mentioned there are a lot of existing solutions to this problem. I'm not averse to reimplementing tools myself, but it you're going to do that it makes sense to add improvements along the way.

One obvious improvement would be to compress the stored data, via gzip/bzip/similar, which would result in a smaller binary. As a small side-effect the embedded resources would be less visible to anybody who ran "strings" against your binary.