I'm having trouble understanding what this means. It seems to imply that doing this ensures that you can restore the factory firmware ("official" firmware?) if you take this backup—but after you flash your radio with the OpenGD77 firmware.Installation of the firmware is undertaken at the owner's own risk, but the official firmware can usually be reloaded onto the radio if the user has problems with the firmware, as long as the operator takes a full backup of their radio using the OpenGD77 CPS immediately after the firmware has been installed
Or does it mean something else? If you're having problems with the radio after flashing it with OpenGD77, it can't really do much good to have a backup of the same firmware, can it? The user manual can't mean this; it doesn't make any sense.
But then, how could taking a backup of the flashed firmware help you restore the factory firmware? That doesn't make much sense, either. The user manual refers to the "official" firmware but it's really not clear what "official" means—is that the factory firmware, or OpenGD77?
My best guess is that it's suggesting that if I somehow screw up OpenGD77 on my radio (how?!), I could just restore to the state it was in immediately after I uploaded it. Except it's hard for me to imagine how anyone could screw up a radio that badly, or why one couldn't just flash the radio with OpenGD77 again using the firmware uploader.
Bottom line: I'm going to switch to OpenGD77 but I do not like being boxed into a corner. And yeah, I know, I could just restore the factory firmware from Baofeng (I've got a DM-1701), except that Raddiodity is not up to date on firmware for this radio. Current release on my radio: 2.06. Most recent release on Raddioddity for the DM-1701: 2.03. So I'd be going back to a potentially buggier version.
https://www.radioddity.com/pages/baofeng-download
(The truth is I'll probably be happier with OpenGD77 and never look back, but if you can't tell, I get a little nervous when it comes to firmware.)