Backing up my 3DS digital games on unmodded New 3DS XL to put on a modded New 3DS?

[lilyuwuu]

Just my luck. The 2019/2020 R4 Gold Pro listing I ordered from gave me another 2021 one. What the heck!?

I'm getting fed up with trying to get a ntrboot compatible card...so my question now is: if I was to just mod my New 3DS XL to back up all my digital games and saves, is it possible to revert it back to stock firmware somehow after I'm done?

Yes - you can follow the Uninstall CFW guide once you're done doing what you need to do. However, that wouldn´t necessarily decrease any ban risk because if Nintendo were flagging consoles by installed titles then your console would be flagged the moment that homebrew software is installed to home menu, regardless of whether you uninstall CFW later on or not. The uninstall CFW guide is also quite cumbersome, as it aims to wipe out any potential remnant of CFW from any setup (whereas your console would have a much more 'vanilla' setup to begin with and therefore steps relating to DS mode or region changing would be kind of a waste because those wouldn´t have been things that you've done).

If you're dead-set on keeping the console as 'vanilla' as possible, I would recommend the following:

- Install custom firmware via Seedminer -> unSAFE_MODE (PicHaxx requires downloading Pokemon Picross and thus an NNID, which adds an additional variable that we don´t need)
- Once boot9strap is installed (at the end of the unSAFE_MODE page), do not continue to Finalizing Setup - instead, install GodMode9 and perform whatever backups you want to do (as was advised with ntrboot, you may not want to accept the "Essentials backup" thing as that writes system-unique files to an unused part of NAND, which obviously wouldn´t occur from a stock environment)
- Once you're done making all your backups, run the Safety Test script to make absolutely sure that uninstalling CFW will not brick your console (you should boot to home menu easily since hypothetically there should have been no changes to NAND), then run the "uninstall hax" script via GM9Megascript

As others have told you on this thread though, it's a lot less cumbersome to just keep the console modded. There's effectively no benefit to keeping it unmodded, especially as warranty and repairs begin to wind down with end of life.

 

[GammaGulp]

Yes - you can follow the Uninstall CFW guide once you're done doing what you need to do. However, that wouldn´t necessarily decrease any ban risk because if Nintendo were flagging consoles by installed titles then your console would be flagged the moment that homebrew software is installed to home menu, regardless of whether you uninstall CFW later on or not. The uninstall CFW guide is also quite cumbersome, as it aims to wipe out any potential remnant of CFW from any setup (whereas your console would have a much more 'vanilla' setup to begin with and therefore steps relating to DS mode or region changing would be kind of a waste because those wouldn´t have been things that you've done).

If you're dead-set on keeping the console as 'vanilla' as possible, I would recommend the following:

- Install custom firmware via Seedminer -> unSAFE_MODE (PicHaxx requires downloading Pokemon Picross and thus an NNID, which adds an additional variable that we don´t need)
- Once boot9strap is installed (at the end of the unSAFE_MODE page), do not continue to Finalizing Setup - instead, install GodMode9 and perform whatever backups you want to do (as was advised with ntrboot, you may not want to accept the "Essentials backup" thing as that writes system-unique files to an unused part of NAND, which obviously wouldn´t occur from a stock environment)
- Once you're done making all your backups, run the Safety Test script to make absolutely sure that uninstalling CFW will not brick your console (you should boot to home menu easily since hypothetically there should have been no changes to NAND), then run the "uninstall hax" script via GM9Megascript

As others have told you on this thread though, it's a lot less cumbersome to just keep the console modded. There's effectively no benefit to keeping it unmodded, especially as warranty and repairs begin to wind down with end of life.

Thanks. For your suggested method, would that mean I wouldn't be able to install and launch Checkpoint to back up save files? I would still need to back up certain save files for physical games that utilize the SD card to maintain save data.

 

[lilyuwuu]

Thanks. For your suggested method, would that mean I wouldn't be able to install and launch Checkpoint to back up save files? I would still need to back up certain save files for physical games that utilize the SD card to maintain save data.

You could launch Homebrew Launcher via download play takeover and launch checkpoint from there. The goal would be to avoid installing any title to home menu since that would be what would hypothetically be "flagged".

Alternatively, you could decrypt the data on the SD (and thus save data) with ninfs and 3ds-save-tool, then extract the save data manually.