tlhonmey - 2025-04-09

The existing checksum methods are good for making sure the image hasn't been damaged and that it's been correctly restored to the target. But, if it has been damaged, there's really nothing you can do about it.

Since copying only used sectors and compressing seriously reduces the image size, it might be nice to have a checksum option that generates parity data at some level of redundancy. This way damage to the image can not only be detected, but possibly repaired as well.

Obviously this can be done with external tools, but that adds complexity to the image save and restore processes, so since several of the available tools for generating such parity data would likely plug seamlessly into the checksum generation step it could be a useful feature.