[a1369209993]

> using the backup for its intended purpose: to restore a system after hardware failure.

No. The intended purpose of a backup is to restore the data (such as the Frogger 2 source code) after a hardware failure. If it has the side effect of also producing a working system, that's good, but it's not the point. After all, the hardware necessary to build a working system may not exist any more; one (only-probably not the last) instance of said hardware just broke, after all.

[kjs3]

Your one trivial use case isn't all use cases, and it sure isn't my important one. If you're doing more than backing up your personal workstation, metadata is extremely important. If I ever have to restore something, even just data, out of the multi-petabytes we have on tape, I better not have to manually go through it to figure out who should actually have access to it before I make it available to the people who need it.

[Spooky23]

The metadata matters.