Ohh you are right, I didn't fully understood your point earlier.
Creating a new object of type settings_type will contain the default values, which I can then use to overwrite on the variable s and EEprom area.
What lead me to comparing the "default saved in eeprom" with the "default coded in program" is that I need to make sure that the eeprom defaults are overwritten if a new version of the program has more (or less) parameters in the settings_type object.