Hacking [Hekate / NAND] What exactly is an "incomplete" nand backup?

[DannX]

I hope this is the right forum to ask this.

So I had a backup of my switch nand on an external hard drive, but it recently died so I lost the backup. My console is fine and never had an error but I want to create a new backup, even if it's not clean anymore, better than nothing. The problem is, I don't have 30gb of extra space available to store a new full backup at the moment. I've seen that hekate has the option to create a system backup that seems to take around 2gb in space. However hekate warns this type of backup is incomplete.

I'm confused about what does it mean for the backup to be incomplete and how would that affect me. Does it mean that it includes only the system partition, leaving the user partition out, like I think it does, since there's another option in hekate to dump the user partition?

In the off case that I need to downgrade, softbrick, etc., could I use this "incomplete" system partition + boot0 and 1 to restore my console, or should I still make a full nand backup regardless?

 

[eyeliner]

Yes, the games partition woon't get saved, so you basically have an empty backup and have to reinstall everything again, like booting the console new.

You'll get the EmmC SYS partition. It isn't really necessary to make a full backup, unless you have a weird fetish for your installed games.

 

[DannX]

Thank you! That's what I needed to know. I don't mind reinstalling everything, this is more of a failsafe I want to have just in case something goes wrong in the future.

 

[Draxzelex]

I should also add that eMMC USER contains your save data too so if that is not backed up, that will also be lost forever.

 

[DannX]

Thank you for telling me this, I also use JKSV to backup my saves externally, so that shouldn't be a problem.