Making a digital backup of your game library - what hardware to use?

[danstan21]

I think this is okay to ask here...? No hard feelings if needs to be removed!

Reading a recent story about how a batch of PAL copies of Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have been breaking over the last year has reminded me once again that all physical matter is limited, and that I should look into making a digital backup of my retro game library in preparation for my eventual upload to Skynet.

With so many forms of (proprietary) physical media though, this is no small task. PS1, PS2 and Saturn games can be dumped with a CD/DVD drives and a PC, but outside of these examples everything gets more complicated.

I've read that more recent consoles running homebrew apps can often dump to an SD card, e.g.:

Dreamcast - can backup DC games with an 3rd-party SD card reader that plugs into the serial port
3DS - can backup 3DS and DS carts to the mounted SD card
Wii - can backup GC, Wii and even GBA (though not GB/C) games via GC-to-GBA link cable to the mounted SD card

...but that leaves a lot of older formats in the dust. I've seen monster cart-readers like this one but 1) that's a lot of money and 2) there doesn't seem to be one go-to recommendation among the many options.

So, for anyone who's done this sort of thing, what hardware did you use for all your consoles?

[importaku]

To be honest making backups of your games is pretty pointless as most can be found online to download unless it's something extemely niche or rare so if your copy died that you could in theory find a replacement to download although it is getting harder to find decent rom sites but there are still some places out there plus torrents must admit though that some japanese PS1 games are impossible to find so the only copies i have for use with the ps classic mini are ones i ripped from my own disks i used imageburn for doing that and followed guides online as it's not always easy as they sometimes are in weird formats.

What you really should be making backups of is your save files they are far more valuable. I realised this when nintendo killed their DS wifi connection service and all that free dlc that was sent out for a boatload of titles was essentially now gone. Thankfully my carts contain all that data attached to the save files for most of the games i played so i made sure i had a few devices to back up my save files safely onto my pc. I udes a NDS save adapter from EMS However some games are not supported so you can't get them ripped however for the few games i have like that like my DS TV adapter which has a series of game & watch games unlocked which i can't extract the save for i have found action replay codes to unlock them again if i lost my save file.

I use homebrew on my 3DS to do the same thing my original gen launch 3DS i hacked so i could install save extractors in to back up all my 3DS save data however it's not as simple as if my original 3DS breaks i'm stuck with a way to get them back on i never looked into it much to see if there's some device made to do the same. Although with how old the 3DS is now i doubt any device is easily found hell even action replays are not easy to find anymore.

For my gba stuff i have a little memory stick that plugs into the link port that lets up back up and restore save files sadly it's long out of print. I have quite a few valuable saves like all my warioware games with everything unlocked took me ages to do those so i have them backed up safe same with my mario advance games have all the e-reader data backed up too but that's not a big of an issue as i still have all the cards to enter the data in again if needed.

For gamecube i used a USB memory card but it had limits as some saves on gamecube are locked regardless so unless you start a new game on the usb memory card to back up to pc then you are stuffed. The card is really old and for a lot of the old tech they use older versions of windows for their software which no longer works easily now. Most of my saves are still on the memory cards but they are official cards so they are low risk for corrupting.

for my PS1 saves i now have a fancy usb memory card to back my saves up to my pc, although i also have a special disk full of saves which came with a ps1/2 game library encyclopedia book so i sometimes use that too plus a stack of original ps1 memory cards as they are pretty stable. Only my bemani game saves and a couple of others are really valuable to me as some contain edit data i made from a long time ago.

[speedlolita]

Archive.org

I don't really see the point of backing up your own stuff when known and confirmed clean dumps exist.

Backing up saves is a little different though certainly. For GB and GBA I use a gadget called the GBxCart. This allows me to read and write saves to retail carts. Also allows you to dump retail carts and write ROMs to compatible flash carts. I mainly just wanted this device for writing saves to retail Pokémon carts between battery changes... Although I've fallen back on mainly just playing GB stuff via EverDrive devices and soon the Analogue Pocket...

For PS1 and PS2 saves you can use uLaunchELF to backup those to a mass storage device. The MemCard Pro (for PS1) that importaku mentions above makes this a breeze too.