Okay, so recently I've become interested in backing up my Wii U external HDD. Since Nintendo has basically condemned the Wii U to die in favor of the Switch (a very poor decision), I would like to have a backup of all my games. And like many others, I store my game data on an external HDD connected to my Wii U via USB.
Unfortunately, it seems that the state of backing up one's Wii U hard drive is rather... anemic, to put it bluntly. After searching and searching through many different options, I will post what I've found here. None of my options seem very good and I'm hoping that the community here can give me some wisdom on the best course of action.
So, first things first. When I typically do a backup of any HDD, I like to make a compressed disk image of the drive. Or, at least I like to make a compressed image of the filesystem if the drive's empty space is not zeroed out. For my Wii U HDD, I unfortunately forgot to zero out the thing before I started using it. This means that the empty space on the drive is just filled with random noise and it basically nullifies the goal of compression.
Since this HDD is fairly big, i.e. several TB, I do not want to just keep an enormous disk image sitting around on my backup drives. That would be a flagrant waste of space, in my opinion anyway. So I thought that maybe I could use a tool to traverse the HDD's filesystem and backup its contents. Obviously, this means that I'm looking for a Wii U file explorer.
Yet, as I'm sure many of you know, there have been several discussions and attempts at making a Wii U file browser and none of them have had any success yet, except for FTPiiU. Unfortunately, FTPiiU is not amazing. I mean, it's great for casually browsing files, but it tends to hang on some directories and it certainly is not ideal for copying many files or any large files. It also requires you to use FileZilla, which is also buggy itself sometimes.
The only other attempts that I've seen are from CreeperMario and rw-r-r_0644. rw-r-r_0644's last mention of an attempt was in this thread. Unfortunately, the discussion kind of petered off and no real progress was made. All we have is this Github repository which, as you can see, is quite inactive. In fact, according to rw-r-r_0644, the only function that got implemented was the "delete" function which was buggy itself and would actually format your SD card
Anyway, as I said, the other effort was spearheaded by CreeperMario. But that also kind of petered off (and the current repository is marked as archived or read-only), until he expressed interest in it once again this past February. Either way, both of the current file explorer attempts are not usable at the moment and require substantial development.
So I figured that file explorers are off the table for now. However, I did find some interesting whispers here on the forum about how to use a FAT32 HDD as an SD card and a storage device for games. I found one such whisper here and another here. Apparently, it relies on a "bug" in Mocha although I think it sounds like a useful feature. It also gives me a clue about the Wii U filesystem, of which I have heard nothing about from anyone. It must be at least somewhat compatible with FAT, or else this scheme wouldn't work. I assume that Nintendo may be in fact using exFAT as their filesystem and perhaps just changed the headers and some other details. It would make sense as to why one can theoretically use this trick from Mocha and use the HDD as an SD card and as a storage device, which the Wii U is expecting to be formatted to its own special format (which may not be so special after all).
Anyway, that's just an interesting thought that I wanted to point out and may make someone's job a little easier. I also found some miscellaneous other tools for extracting data from a Wii U filesystem (listed in no particular order):
At this point, after finding all of this stuff, I began to wonder whether homebrewed solutions to this problem are even the best ones. According to Nintendo, the best way to do it is to just copy the data from your old drive to a new one. I am reluctant about this method since I have seen Nintendo's Data Management tools fail more than once in strange ways. I also do not want to have to rely on yet another HDD which could also fail at any given moment. I'd rather have a more portable disk image which can easily be moved from one storage medium to another, even to the cloud (ugh, what an icky buzzword).
I also see that this method is what's recommended from normal users' blog posts such as this, this, or even on /r/wiiu. Is this really the best option? To just buy another HDD and copy the old drive's contents to the new one? That's a somewhat sorry state of affairs, if so.
Unfortunately, it seems that the state of backing up one's Wii U hard drive is rather... anemic, to put it bluntly. After searching and searching through many different options, I will post what I've found here. None of my options seem very good and I'm hoping that the community here can give me some wisdom on the best course of action.
So, first things first. When I typically do a backup of any HDD, I like to make a compressed disk image of the drive. Or, at least I like to make a compressed image of the filesystem if the drive's empty space is not zeroed out. For my Wii U HDD, I unfortunately forgot to zero out the thing before I started using it. This means that the empty space on the drive is just filled with random noise and it basically nullifies the goal of compression.
Since this HDD is fairly big, i.e. several TB, I do not want to just keep an enormous disk image sitting around on my backup drives. That would be a flagrant waste of space, in my opinion anyway. So I thought that maybe I could use a tool to traverse the HDD's filesystem and backup its contents. Obviously, this means that I'm looking for a Wii U file explorer.
Yet, as I'm sure many of you know, there have been several discussions and attempts at making a Wii U file browser and none of them have had any success yet, except for FTPiiU. Unfortunately, FTPiiU is not amazing. I mean, it's great for casually browsing files, but it tends to hang on some directories and it certainly is not ideal for copying many files or any large files. It also requires you to use FileZilla, which is also buggy itself sometimes.
The only other attempts that I've seen are from CreeperMario and rw-r-r_0644. rw-r-r_0644's last mention of an attempt was in this thread. Unfortunately, the discussion kind of petered off and no real progress was made. All we have is this Github repository which, as you can see, is quite inactive. In fact, according to rw-r-r_0644, the only function that got implemented was the "delete" function which was buggy itself and would actually format your SD card
Anyway, as I said, the other effort was spearheaded by CreeperMario. But that also kind of petered off (and the current repository is marked as archived or read-only), until he expressed interest in it once again this past February. Either way, both of the current file explorer attempts are not usable at the moment and require substantial development.
So I figured that file explorers are off the table for now. However, I did find some interesting whispers here on the forum about how to use a FAT32 HDD as an SD card and a storage device for games. I found one such whisper here and another here. Apparently, it relies on a "bug" in Mocha although I think it sounds like a useful feature. It also gives me a clue about the Wii U filesystem, of which I have heard nothing about from anyone. It must be at least somewhat compatible with FAT, or else this scheme wouldn't work. I assume that Nintendo may be in fact using exFAT as their filesystem and perhaps just changed the headers and some other details. It would make sense as to why one can theoretically use this trick from Mocha and use the HDD as an SD card and as a storage device, which the Wii U is expecting to be formatted to its own special format (which may not be so special after all).
Anyway, that's just an interesting thought that I wanted to point out and may make someone's job a little easier. I also found some miscellaneous other tools for extracting data from a Wii U filesystem (listed in no particular order):
- https://gbatemp.net/threads/semi-working-nfs2iso2nfs-convert-nfs-to-iso-and-back.455812/
- https://github.com/yellows8/wiiu_wfsmount
- https://gbatemp.net/threads/ddd-wiiu-title-dumper.418492/
At this point, after finding all of this stuff, I began to wonder whether homebrewed solutions to this problem are even the best ones. According to Nintendo, the best way to do it is to just copy the data from your old drive to a new one. I am reluctant about this method since I have seen Nintendo's Data Management tools fail more than once in strange ways. I also do not want to have to rely on yet another HDD which could also fail at any given moment. I'd rather have a more portable disk image which can easily be moved from one storage medium to another, even to the cloud (ugh, what an icky buzzword).
I also see that this method is what's recommended from normal users' blog posts such as this, this, or even on /r/wiiu. Is this really the best option? To just buy another HDD and copy the old drive's contents to the new one? That's a somewhat sorry state of affairs, if so.
