TRY AN ARCHIVE BEFORE YOU CREATE ONE
Family PC 2012 - fictional ArchiveHive sample, version 1

This is a synthetic disk image with invented notes, a recipe, a garden sketch
and two visibly labelled AI-generated photographs. No real family records or
physical-drive capture were used. The 2012 setting is fictional.

BEFORE YOU START

Download ArchiveHive 1.1.0 or later from https://archivehive.app/releases.
Use Windows 10 or later (64-bit), or macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon.
No licence is needed for this sample. Allow 250 MB of working space.

Download the healthy and repair-practice ZIPs to separate folders. Extract
each ZIP completely. Do not run archive actions on files still inside a ZIP.
The ZIP download itself is intact: one image-chunk byte inside the practice
archive was deliberately changed after its integrity records were written.

1. OPEN THE HEALTHY REFERENCE

In Archives, choose Add archive folder... (Windows) or Add folder... (macOS).
Select the extracted healthy ZIP's parent folder containing Family-PC-2012.
Its card is labelled "Family PC 2012 - fictional demo".

Choose Standard integrity check on Windows, or Verify on macOS. It should pass.
For the deeper check, Windows has Full image verification under More actions
and what they do; macOS has Full verify. That should pass too.

Search for apple-cake. The included index should find
Documents/Grandmas-apple-cake.pdf. Searching an index does not open the file.
Use Browse files read-only (Windows, under More actions) or Mount (macOS)
to browse the image, then open the recipe. Mounting may ask for system
permission. Close the temporary mount in the app when finished.

2. CHECK THE PRACTICE COPY

Remove the healthy folder from the library's registered folders first, so
repair can demonstrate its included PAR2 data without using that copy.
Removing a registered folder does not delete the archive files.
Add the repair-practice ZIP's extracted parent folder instead.

Run the individual Standard integrity check / Verify action. It should
report damage to image.img.zst.part0001. This is the expected result.
Do not use Check all copies yet: that action can repair as well as check.

3. REPAIR, CHECK, AND OPEN THE FILE AGAIN

Choose Repair damaged archive... on Windows (under More actions), or Repair
on macOS. Repair changes files in the practice archive; confirm that this
is the practice folder you extracted. Let repair finish.

Run Full image verification / Full verify. It should pass. Mount the repaired
archive and open the recipe or either photograph. Their bytes should match
the healthy reference. The sample-manifest.json download records the expected
raw-image, image-chunk and individual-file SHA-256 hashes.

The complete folder need not be byte-identical afterwards: checks and repairs
can update operational logs, status records, indexes and checksum inventories.
The expected image and content-file hashes are the evidence of restoration.

TO START OVER

Close any temporary mount, remove the practice folder from the library, and
extract the original repair-practice ZIP into a new folder. Keep the ZIP
unchanged so you can repeat the exercise.

WHAT THIS SHOWS

Checks can detect stored damage; sufficient recovery data can repair it.
This deliberately small, repairable example does not predict speed on a real
drive, guarantee repair after arbitrary damage, or recover bytes a source
drive never returned. Keep independent checked copies of real archives.

Walkthrough and expected download checksums: https://archivehive.app/sample
Next: https://archivehive.app/first-archive