A restore's first act is to delete the class of records it is about to
rebuild, so a payload whose documents section is simply absent did not
"restore everything else". It emptied the vault, reported success, and left
the operator to find the hole later.
The whole file is refused instead, above the transaction that wipes the
account, and the refusal names the section and says nothing was changed —
an operator holding the only copy of an account cannot act on "restore
failed". The sections ride the error envelope as meta.errorCode
backup.section.missing, and the admin console holds them in a panel beside
the skip report rather than a toast that outlives nothing.
The manifest is the discriminator, and only the manifest. A portable export
leaves the mental-health screeners and the consent receipts out on purpose
and declares both as omitted; those files still restore. So does a file
whose section is present and empty, which is what an account with no
documents honestly writes, and so does every backup written before the
manifest existed. The integration test proves the distinction with the same
builder and the same deleted keys, differing only in what the manifest said.
The route is deliberately outside the published contract — requireAdmin is
cookie-only — so the OpenAPI document is unchanged.
