Hacking Extract Titles installed on USB for backup purpose, possible?

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

As the title says, I'm wondering if it's possible to copy back on the SD card titles that were previously installed on a USB HDD for archival purpose.

I no longer have the original files I used for the initial installation but now I would like to bring them back on a PC for "rainy days" :-P

Whenever I try to search on google or here, I always get guides to do the opposite (i.e.: copy games from SD to USB) which of course I don't care about. I figured it should be possible to FTP them back, but I read that FTP transfers might not always work as expected and painfully slow (I haven't fiddled with FTPiiu Everywhere myself, just yet). Is there a homebrew to dump HDD games on SD, or what's the best course of actions to accomplish this? I'd prefer to avoid re-downloading them through USB Helper if possible.

Thanks in advance for your suggestion!

Cheers

bitzthatbyte · Sep 1, 2018

Was thinking exactly the same the other day. I wonder if disc2app could be modified to like app2app or something. I personally wouldn't have a clue how to do this......

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

steveja82 said:
Was thinking exactly the same the other day. I wonder if disc2app could be modified to like app2app or something. I personally wouldn't have a clue how to do this......

As I've been thinking and researching about this for a while, I also stumbled on disc2app, and had the same thought. I wouldn't hold my breath on a disc2app-app2app_mod though. I think it may be possible through FTP transfer after all, even though I read conflicting info regarding FTPiiu having access to only the SD card or the entire system (Nand, USB and SD). I've also been pondering the wfs-fuse route; maybe that's the best shot, if there's no easy or obvious way to copy back on SD.

Cyan · Sep 1, 2018

actually an app dumper existed before disc2app, but it dumped only accessed files.
some games had missing libraries from the /code/ folder.
content and meta folders are copied entirely.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/418492
load that homebrew, then launch the game. it'll dump the decrypted content (not the .app, because the console doesn't have them ! only the discs have encrypted app)
then, use ftp to verify you got all the /code/ folder's content.
I think automatic ddd+missing file manually from ftp is a good method.

other solutions are full FTP access and eyekey's WFS dumper.

In all cases, you'll have to repack to encrypted app (nuspacker) if you want to install the game again.

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

Cyan said:
actually an app dumper existed before disc2app, but it dumped only accessed files.
some games had missing libraries from the /code/ folder.
content and meta folders are copied entirely.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/418492
load that homebrew, then launch the game. it'll dump the decrypted content (not the .app, because the console doesn't have them ! only the discs have encrypted app)
then, use ftp to verify you got all the /code/ folder's content.
I think automatic ddd+missing file manually from ftp is a good method.

other solutions are full FTP access and eyekey's WFS dumper.

In all cases, you'll have to repack to encrypted app (nuspacker) if you want to install the game again.

Thanks for your reply! Now that I looked at the link, I remembered ddd was what gave me in the first place the idea that FTP transferring was going to be finicky, with all the massaging needed to start the dumping and all. :-P
One question though: since ddd is in essence dumping via FTP, isn't it superseded by transferring using FTPiiu Everywhere directly? I mean, wouldn't FTPiiu at least allow to skip the steps on the WiiU side (launching the game, etc.)? And would using a gigabit USB adapter to wire the WiiU to the router have any effect on the transfer speed? (ok it was two questions, actually)

I read a bit more about WFS Dumper and it seems that I would have to first dump the entire drive on a PC, then mount the resulting image to extract what I care to backup (instead of direct-mounting the file-system straight from the drive, as I originally thought it was possible). On top of all that you say it's still necessary to use nuspacker to re-encrypt into .app/.h3 format? If this is the case, it's starting to become pretty obvious that re-downloading is hands down the way to go for me (I'm have a 300Mbps downlink).

I guess I'll play around with the ddd and FTPiiu (for like a split second) and then will get that USB Helper going then!

Thanks for the input!

Cyan · Sep 1, 2018

if the ftp connection is stable, go with ftp.
no idea about wired connection.

I think ddd can resume a partial dump. FTP client should do it without problem.

I also forget, you'll need the ticket to reinstall the .app files, you can use tik2sd to know where it's located. attention, some files have multiple tickets inside, look at the size.

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

if the wired LAN adapter doesn't affect (for the better) the transfer speed, I will go the USB Helper route, but if it does improve it, it'll keep in mind the tik2sd tip (and will report back about the speed)!

Cyan · Sep 1, 2018

if you get games from nus and you have retail games, use your own tickets instead of the one from ticketwebsite.
it will prevent issue when wanting to play a game disc you own, but the ticket doesn't match, for example.

xs4all · Sep 1, 2018

I can confirm that the WIRED LAN adapter does not make any difference over a good WIFI connection, for more details of my tests, I have posted a reply about this HERE.

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

xs4all said:
I can confirm that the WIRED LAN adapter does not make any difference over a good WIFI connection, for more details of my tests, I have posted a reply about this HERE.

Thanks for your reply! I see though that you tested transferring from a PC to SD and the speed you are getting reminds a lot what you can get on an SD on a 3DS (atrocious, that is). It's entirely possible that N used the same crappy SD module on both consoles, bottlenecking at the same 1-1.4MB/s (while writing that is). But since we know that the USB transfer rate is higher than that (from loadiine underperforming compared to USB installed games), maybe there's hope that transferring from wiiu to pc, only using the USB bus may lead to different results (even copying from usb to usb on wiiu is faster than sd to usb already). Have you tried that?

xs4all · Sep 1, 2018

easyonme said:
Thanks for your reply! I see though that you tested transferring from a PC to SD and the speed you are getting reminds a lot what you can get on an SD on a 3DS (atrocious, that is). It's entirely possible that N used the same crappy SD module on both consoles, bottlenecking at the same 1-1.4MB/s (while writing that is). But since we know that the USB transfer rate is higher than that (from loadiine underperforming compared to USB installed games), maybe there's hope that transferring from wiiu to pc, only using the USB bus may lead to different results (even copying from usb to usb on wiiu is faster than sd to usb already). Have you tried that?

Good question, no I have not tried transferring between PC <-> USB connected to the WiiU.

Below are my tests I done a few moments ago.

Same deal as before:

Using FIX94's FTPiiU Everywhere:
FTP Client: FileZilla
My Network: 1Gb LAN

Test: 175mb file transfer

PC to Internal System Memory and External USB connected to the WiiU:
LAN (with Haxchi CFW): Average of 140kbs.

Internal System Memory to PC:
LAN (with Haxchi CFW): Average of 1.4mb/s.

External USB connected to the WiiU to PC:
LAN (with Haxchi CFW): Average of 1.3mb/s.

Note:
The 174mb file I tested was from one of my custom injected DS Virtual Console installed on my external USB drive:
/storage_usb/usr/title/00050000/xxxxxxx/content/0010/rom.zip

Originally I tried to transfer a file (262mb file) from a Wii Virtual Console game at the following location:
/storage_usb/usr/title/00050000/xxxxxxxx/content/hif_000000.nfs

FileZilla keeps throwing a Critical file transfer error when trying to transfer these large files, smaller files are fine so I'm not sure at what size will throw this error? So it's it could be anyware from 174mb to 263mb?
I thought it could be the External USB drive, so I transfer the Wii VC game to the System Memory and tried to transfer the 262mb file again and again, get the same error message.
I also used Firefox browser to connect to the WiiU via FTP and same thing happens, can't download the 262mb file, smaller files are file through the browser, so it kinda rules out my FileZilla is the issue.

If you were to FTP the files from WiiU to PC, it's going to be painfully slow and may not work if files are large, according to my tests.

To technical for me but again, there seems to be a bottle neck somewhere.

easyonme · Sep 1, 2018

@xs4all
Thanks for following up and getting more tests done! I actually went ahead and tried myself after I replied to you earlier and sadly I got the same results. The only difference though is that I'm not incurring in a "Critical file transfer error" when trying to transfer files larger than 262MB. I just tested with a loose file from "Transformers Prime", weighting 458MB and went through without any hiccups, in fact I even had it downloading while concurrently transferring another file (38.3MB), in hope it would boost the speed through aggregation, but unfortunately the downstream remained capped at exactly 11Mbps according to windows task manager (or 1.3MiB/s according to Filezilla).

I found this about .nfs files:

ihaveamac said:
nfs files are stored in some weird way. can't read them using ftpiiu-everywhere or other tools. when trying to read using wfs-fuse the files are all zero.

expected content from an extracted download (EGGS/SGGE header):

also in the FST format they're stored using type 0x02, instead of 0x00 for normal files.

Maybe you are hitting a particular case were "Critical file transfer error" occurs because of the filetype you are trying to transfer, rather than the size itself. Make sure that you push up to 10 the "maximum simultaneous transfers" on Filezilla (mine was set to 2 by default, and I did get the "Critical file transfer error" when trying to download 2 files at the same time - the FTP browsing counts as 1 connection already)

I'm testing transfer of another file weighting 694MB as I type this, and still going "strong" (if 9'20'' were to be an acceptable rate for a file this small).

On a side note, my WiiU refuses to recognize my Gigabit USB adapter, so I had to fall back on my old 100Mbit one. I guess it doesn't like that's USB 3.0, but whatever.

After all this, I'm now definitely convinced that re-downloading the titles is by far the fastest and most efficient way to go about!

Thank you for your cooperation!

Cheers,

xs4all · Sep 2, 2018

@easyonme

Glad I could help in some way and thanks for the additional information, much appreciate it and I'm sure others will find these useful.

Yes, re downloading the games again via apps like WiiU USB Helper is the way to go, my WiiU backup hard drive got corrupted a while back, lost everything, so had to painstakingly re downloaded all the games again.

Hacking Extract Titles installed on USB for backup purpose, possible?

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