assets/flash.img was gitignored, so the only copy of the never-booted image lived
on one disk. The emulator writes to that image, so a session can leave edited
settings or a damaged EEPROM behind with nothing to restore from.
assets/pristine/ now holds the image as first generated, gzipped and checksummed,
and is tracked deliberately. Gzip takes it from 2 MiB to 2.3 KiB because the image
is nearly all 0xFF, which is what makes keeping it in git reasonable. The live
image and its .bak-* files stay ignored.
Two checksums are recorded, for the archive and for its contents, so a corrupted
archive is distinguishable from one that was replaced.
tools/restore_flash.sh verifies, diffs, or restores. Restore backs up the current
image first, then re-checks the result, since a restore that silently half-worked
would be worse than none.
Verified by deliberately corrupting the live image: --diff reported 32 differing
bytes, restore backed up and rewrote it, and --diff then reported no change. The
image is currently byte-identical to what make_flash.py produces, so this is the
genuine original rather than a copy of something already used.