what is the file size of your emunand bin i dont think theres any saves in that bin the saves arent in the emunand partion (the one you cant see)
It is 1.84gb. I am starting to think it just does not backup cia saves.what is the file size of your emunand bin i dont think theres any saves in that bin the saves arent in the emunand partion (the one you cant see)
Then why does nothing happen when I restore my emunand?
There are no saves in emuNAND.bin. You unlinked your NAND's. Your NAND folder is the /Nintendo 3DS/randomcharacterswithnumbersandletters
When your NAND's are linked, they share the randomcharacterswithnumbersandletters folder. When you unlink (format sysNAND in your case), your 3DS creates a new randomcharactersiwthnumbersandletters folder. When you restore your previous randomcharacterswithnumbersandletters folder, this is the folder your emuNAND uses, and your sysNAND uses the other randomcharacterswithnumbersandletters folder that was created after formatting the system.
Well, I deleted my old Nintendo 3DS folder from my sd card instead of backing it up. I thought backing up emunand was all I needed instead of the folder. I regret doing this but, I guess nothing can be done about. Thanks for your help.
All right I'm gonna try explaining this best as I can, so hang on for a moment
So suppose you had a completely normal non-hacked 3DS, yeah? You have a couple of games on cartridges and a couple of eShop games
When you pull out the SD card, your eShop games don't show up on the home screen. This is because they aren't stored on the NAND (a chip inside the system), but on the SD card in the Nintendo 3DS folder. Same applies to the save files of the eShop games, they're not on the NAND, they're on the SD. (The only exception is DSiWare games, as those are on the NAND) Retail cartridges however, would be fine as the saves are on the cart themselves.
Now when you create emuNAND it's the same, except it isn't using the NAND inside your console, it's creating a hidden partition on your SD card that you can't open and view the contents of, which pretends it's the NAND chip inside the console.
When you use emuNAND tool to create a backup, it extracts the contents of this hidden partition/fake NAND and backs it up in a .bin file. As with the previous example, the saves are just in the SD card contents. So emuNAND tool has no bearing whatsoever on the save files nor the games that you previously had installed as .CIA .
You with me so far?
All right, this means that before you perform a system format on emunand, you need to have done two things:
1) Use emuNAND tool to backup your emuNAND (sounds like you already did this)
2) Copy paste all the contents from the SD card to somewhere safe on your computer
Did you do just 1, or both 1 and 2? If you only did 1 then I'm afraid your saves are gone
Well, I backed up everything in my sd card except, the Nintendo 3DS folder. I guess I lost my saves. But thanks for your help. I have never used the emunand tool and did not know how it worked. I thought it would restore the Nintendo 3ds folder so I didn't back it up.
Guess we learned that the hard way. But, atleast now I know what I need to do, the next time I backup my emunand.i did the same thing first tie i backed up emunand then i erased the old sd card and filled it with roms i wasent to far in the games so i didnt try geting the data back. from now on make sure you back up saves with save data filer
I guess this is a better program to backup up my emunand. Thank you all for your help.Alternatively to this, you can use WinDisk32Imager which will grab your entire SD card and emuNAND partitions. Of course, test with a second SD card to restore to before restoring over your current image. But that's an all-encompassing option if you're looking for something with that functionality.
BTW, is it normal for the program to fail with a 2 GB n3ds emunand? It throws a INCORRECT SIZE error and creates a 0 bytes file