Thanks to you (and others) for suggestions and help, it is much appreciated. I have now returned to a fully serviceable PiZero with a camera connection.
The comment about SD card backups is noted and from now forwards will be carried out before major changes.
You may like to take a look at the 'rsync' backup package if you're not already using it. Its fast because, rather than taking a full backup, it brings the backup into line with the current state of play on your live system, adding/deleting/replacing files and directories as needed to capture each current machine state.
I have a pair of 1GB WD Essential USB drives which are kept offline and used alternatively to do a weekly backup of all my systems (3x Linux x86 and (currently) one RPi), so I always have last week's set of backups offline in a fire safe while the two week old backup disk is being updated to capture the current system states.
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