[tonyarkles]

Maybe I'm misinterpreting the output from their backup tool, but isn't that exactly what it's doing?

    Metrics for todoist-fullsync:
    
    name   1 days ago  8 days ago
    ------------------------------
    files  1           1
    bytes  82363       86661
    items  85          87

The "items" line there seems like it's actually parsing the file and counting the number of entries in it? It's also captured in point #2: "Can be intuitively evaluated as plausible or suspicious. If the number of tasks in my Todoist export dropped from dozens to 1, that would be cause for concern."

[jaw]

Right. Aside from 'files' and 'bytes', the metrics are just the result of running shell commands specified in a config file. In this case it's `jq '.items | length' $PARCEL_PATH`, i.e., parse the file and print the length of the attribute named "items".

Obviously, that won't catch all potential problems in the file, but it's a low-effort way to catch some.