Cleaning a dirty sysnand and going online

snow_box

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So here's my situation:

I messed with my hekate_ipl.ini file recently and accidentally started booting CFW on sysnand for the past few days. I've made 100% sure my switch never accessed the internet ever since this. I want to start playing games online so I would need to restore my sysnand with an old backup.

When I first modded my switch months ago, I followed the noob switch mod guide and thankfully made backups of sysnand. For emunand, I perma left it at airplane mode ever since initial mod so no problems there. However, here is where I am unweary of my situation: I've went online on stock (sysnand) in the past and accessed/downloaded content from eShop a couple times.

I've read posts about Nintendo detecting internet logs overlapping and improving their security measures in general so this is why I'm worried. For my case, is it safe to do a sysnand restore and start playing games online legitimately with game cartridges? In recent months/years, has anyone heard of ppl getting banned after their sysnand restore when they're in a similar situation as me? If there is relatively medium risk involved for my situation, I'd MUCH rather get a separate un-modded switch to play online instead.

Thanks so much everyone, appreciate all the help i can get !!!
 

Draxzelex

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So here's my situation:

I messed with my hekate_ipl.ini file recently and accidentally started booting CFW on sysnand for the past few days. I've made 100% sure my switch never accessed the internet ever since this. I want to start playing games online so I would need to restore my sysnand with an old backup.

When I first modded my switch months ago, I followed the noob switch mod guide and thankfully made backups of sysnand. For emunand, I perma left it at airplane mode ever since initial mod so no problems there. However, here is where I am unweary of my situation: I've went online on stock (sysnand) in the past and accessed/downloaded content from eShop a couple times.

I've read posts about Nintendo detecting internet logs overlapping and improving their security measures in general so this is why I'm worried. For my case, is it safe to do a sysnand restore and start playing games online legitimately with game cartridges? In recent months/years, has anyone heard of ppl getting banned after their sysnand restore when they're in a similar situation as me? If there is relatively medium risk involved for my situation, I'd MUCH rather get a separate un-modded switch to play online instead.

Thanks so much everyone, appreciate all the help i can get !!!
Try asking in the Switch Noobs Paradise.
 

snow_box

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Sure thing. I'm pretty new to forums so apologies if I posted this in the wrong place or in the wrong manner.
 

RednaxelaNnamtra

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So here's my situation:

I messed with my hekate_ipl.ini file recently and accidentally started booting CFW on sysnand for the past few days. I've made 100% sure my switch never accessed the internet ever since this. I want to start playing games online so I would need to restore my sysnand with an old backup.

When I first modded my switch months ago, I followed the noob switch mod guide and thankfully made backups of sysnand. For emunand, I perma left it at airplane mode ever since initial mod so no problems there. However, here is where I am unweary of my situation: I've went online on stock (sysnand) in the past and accessed/downloaded content from eShop a couple times.

I've read posts about Nintendo detecting internet logs overlapping and improving their security measures in general so this is why I'm worried. For my case, is it safe to do a sysnand restore and start playing games online legitimately with game cartridges? In recent months/years, has anyone heard of ppl getting banned after their sysnand restore when they're in a similar situation as me? If there is relatively medium risk involved for my situation, I'd MUCH rather get a separate un-modded switch to play online instead.

Thanks so much everyone, appreciate all the help i can get !!!
What exactly did you do in the sysnand?
Because just booting Atmosphere on it is no real problem, only if you did things like installing nsps/Xcis you might be at a risk of being banned if you go online without restoring/cleaning up the nand.

I'm online for multiple years by now, always in CFW, no problem or ban yet, but I also only use homebrew and system modules, no (online) cheating or nsps/xcis.

So unless you did something thats deemed dangerous by the atmosphere team, its probably more dangerous to restore an old backup, then to just boot cfw on sysnand and go online with it.
 

snow_box

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I was banned for restoring a NAND that was a lower version than what I was on the previous time I went online, so be careful.
Ah I see, yeah that makes sense. Thanks for the heads-up. I should be good since I never updated my sysnand after initially modding my switch.
 

snow_box

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What exactly did you do in the sysnand?
Because just booting Atmosphere on it is no real problem, only if you did things like installing nsps/Xcis you might be at a risk of being banned if you go online without restoring/cleaning up the nand.

I'm online for multiple years by now, always in CFW, no problem or ban yet, but I also only use homebrew and system modules, no (online) cheating or nsps/xcis.

So unless you did something thats deemed dangerous by the atmosphere team, its probably more dangerous to restore an old backup, then to just boot cfw on sysnand and go online with it.
Thanks for the reply. I downloaded and played with NSPs so that is considered dangerous.

So if I restore/clean up sysnand, is it risky even if I don't mod my switch again after? I'm pretty sure the answer would still be yeah but I just want to be sure.
 

RednaxelaNnamtra

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Thanks for the reply. I downloaded and played with NSPs so that is considered dangerous.

So if I restore/clean up sysnand, is it risky even if I don't mod my switch again after? I'm pretty sure the answer would still be yeah but I just want to be sure.
Going online with a reverted nand always has the difference in the logs, so nintendo always is able to detect them, independent of using cfw or not, unless you explicitly created the backup after you went online last, but before playing around with stuff, then the backup is safe to restore.

About NSPs on sysnand, it might depend on the type of NSPs that defines how problematic they are.
Homebrew NSPs with invalid titleids are fare more dangerous in that regard, than normal game nsps/xcis, since game play logs might look like the normal game played from the cardridge in the play logs. So if you just used game NSPs, I would probably delete them, check if it's possible to delete the fake tickets, and then just continue to use the sysnand for going online.

Also staying in cfw might also be a good idea either way, since atmosphere prevents quite a bit of telemetry to be send and created, so the new log might not even be send to nintendo.

Also important is, if prod info blanking was enabled for the sysnand, since that might result in some even more obvious logs, in which case it would be more complicated and a restore might be the better chance.
 

snow_box

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Going online with a reverted nand always has the difference in the logs, so nintendo always is able to detect them, independent of using cfw or not, unless you explicitly created the backup after you went online last, but before playing around with stuff, then the backup is safe to restore.

About NSPs on sysnand, it might depend on the type of NSPs that defines how problematic they are.
Homebrew NSPs with invalid titleids are fare more dangerous in that regard, than normal game nsps/xcis, since game play logs might look like the normal game played from the cardridge in the play logs. So if you just used game NSPs, I would probably delete them, check if it's possible to delete the fake tickets, and then just continue to use the sysnand for going online.

Also staying in cfw might also be a good idea either way, since atmosphere prevents quite a bit of telemetry to be send and created, so the new log might not even be send to nintendo.

Also important is, if prod info blanking was enabled for the sysnand, since that might result in some even more obvious logs, in which case it would be more complicated and a restore might be the better chance.
Ahhh dang. I've already violated the first point unfortunately since I accessed the internet after creating my clean backup of nand. The other 3 points are very useful too for when I decide to mod another switch. Avoiding bans when modding is much more nuanced than I originally expected so I'll make sure to research as much as I can before going for it a second time.

Thanks for all the help.
 

Chaosta

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Unfortunately you are screwed, restoring a nand after its been online with sketch stuff will only speed up the ban process
 

snow_box

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yup, i know. It's okay, I don't have to restore the nand. I'll just stick to offline on my modded switch and get another switch just for online play.
 

RednaxelaNnamtra

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yup, i know. It's okay, I don't have to restore the nand. I'll just stick to offline on my modded switch and get another switch just for online play.
Keep in mind, that your account and switch are separated, so normally a ban of the switch will not result in a ban of the account, so you can try out things before buying another switch.
So you could just try deleting the NSPs and tickets of them from sysnand, and always stay in cfw even on sysnand, and you might get lucky and never get banned.

Also on a fresh system, if you separate unsafe offline actions like xcis and NSPs to the emunand, with it always staying offline, then its relatively simple to stay safe.
You can even additionally use sysnand cfw then, to do things like menu themes, save backups, streaming or over clocking, as long as you use the album or the title overwrite (holding R while booting a game) to start homebrew on the sysnand.
Also additionally to keeping unsafe offline things to the emunand, also stay away from everything directly affecting nintendos online service, like cheating online or Rom hacking online.
This should mostly be all you need to keep in mind for future modded systems (or maybe even your current system with luck), to be safe.
 
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