Hacking Incremental NAND backup to USB?

[thesund0g]

I would love to be able to make incremental backups of my Wii's NAND to my HDD. Having something start up optionally with Preloader would be great; imagine, the next time you need to restore, you know you have a solid backup. I imagine a script ran on the PC would pretty easily be able to rebuild the NAND from the latest backup. It'd be so convenient. Anyone care to try and make this happen? I'm motivated enough to, but I really don't have enough time to between work and school.

 

[FenrirWolf]

It's not like you'd be able to have your NAND autodumping in the background while you play a game, so I don't see how an automatic NAND dump would be any better than doing it manually. Either way you'll have to sit there and wait for the operation to complete.

 

[thesund0g]

Not to have it done everytime, just to have an option, like hitting 1 during startup (after Preloader chained to it.)

An incremental backup would be much faster than a full one every time. I'm a patient man, especially for peace of mind.

I don't see how an automatic NAND dump would be any better than doing it manually.

I'm lazy.

 

[gameguy95]

Not to have it done everytime, just to have an option, like hitting 1 during startup (after Preloader chained to it.)

An incremental backup would be much faster than a full one every time. I'm a patient man, especially for peace of mind.

I don't see how an automatic NAND dump would be any better than doing it manually.

I'm lazy.

mee too

 

[FenrirWolf]

The part of this idea that I do like is a NAND dumper that checks against the contents of your NAND and only modifie the stuff that was changed. Or perhaps it could have the option of only updating save/channels, and perhaps a setting to update only cIOS's while ignoring the normal ones. No need to dump those every single time.

 

[thesund0g]

It would be a ton faster. Another cool benefit would be a "Time Machine" like backup feature -- do the exact same thing, just don't delete the older backups.

The part of this idea that I do like is a NAND dumper that checks against the contents of your NAND and only modifie the stuff that was changed. Or perhaps it could have the option of only updating save/channels, and perhaps a setting to update only cIOS's while ignoring the normal ones. No need to dump those every single time.

 

[cwstjdenobs]

There's no access/created times etc on the ISFS is there?

 

[FenrirWolf]

That I'm unsure of, which is why being able to choose which parts of the dump you want to update might be a better solution.

 

[Taleweaver]

I'm with Fenrinwolf on this one. A full backup suite kind of program seems overkill (it's not like a wii's interior stuff changes as often as a PC), but a bit more options would be nice. Let's see...

-backup/restore all IOS =200
-backup/restore all savegames
-backup/restore all channels
-backup/restore everything

...should be sufficient (unless I'm missing something). Of course, restoring the first option may not work because it would prevent the program to run, and the second option may only work if you have an IOS you can use, but the other options don't seem excessively difficult.




@gameguy95 and thesund0g: I'm a bit curious...just how often did you guys actually needed all those backups you've made?
(personally, I make about a backup a month, usually prior to making some IOS/cIOS changes. Thus far, I've never needed them).

 

[FenrirWolf]

I've never had to restore and plan to keep it that way. But it never hurts to have up to date backups regardless.

And about restoring the dump, I think the idea here is that you could take the unencrypted dump, pack it into a nand.bin, then restore with BootMii.

I don't even know if there's a program out there that converts unencrypted dumps into BootMii-compatible dumps, though. I've never looked into that before.

 

[thesund0g]

I'm with Fenrinwolf on this one. A full backup suite kind of program seems overkill (it's not like a wii's interior stuff changes as often as a PC)

The idea is that it's an INCREMENTAL backup. This means that you only backup the IOSes, sysmenu, etc. once. Then, if they don't change, you don't back them up again. But you could skip even examining those parts at startup if you wanted.

QUOTE(Wever @ Apr 8 2010, 12:41 AM) @gameguy95 and thesund0g: I'm a bit curious...just how often did you guys actually needed all those backups you've made?
(personally, I make about a backup a month, usually prior to making some IOS/cIOS changes. Thus far, I've never needed them).

Honestly, I've never had to do a NAND restore either, and hopefully I never will have to. Come to think of it, I've never even banner-bricked. I just -really- like the idea of having a very recent fallback should I ever need it. I run scripts like this on my computers pretty regularly.

Another situation in which I imagine it would come in handy -- say someone trashes your savegame, gets past a point of no return, etc. You could just roll back to an earlier version...and another...and another, until you get to where you need to be again. No worries, just jump in, pull out the appropriate file from \private in the timestamped (on ARCHIVED date) archive, no need to rebuild/encrypt the NAND image. If the NAND FS has its own timestamps, great. If not, it doesn't drastically change the way the app would work. You'd just examine the files' hashes as opposed to just checking the timestamps (a poor idea anyway).

Since the FS is encrypted, does the change of a single byte of an unencrypted file change the entire result of the encrypted file, and vice versa, depending on the method? So for incremental backup, would you even need to check more than the first few bytes to see if there had been a change? Perhaps I'm full of shit, but it sounds like a decent idea. I imagine it wouldn't work if the encryption is done by block or otherwise, but it'd be worth looking in to for time-savings.

 

[thesund0g]

I thought that wii.py could do a pack and encrypt, or at least most of it.

And about restoring the dump, I think the idea here is that you could take the unencrypted dump, pack it into a nand.bin, then restore with BootMii.

I don't even know if there's a program out there that converts unencrypted dumps into BootMii-compatible dumps, though. I've never looked into that before.

 

[toejam316]

There's no access/created times etc on the ISFS is there?

You all seemed to miss this.
It'll be a nightmare to setup and it won't run efficiently without last modified dates on the files.

 

[thesund0g]

True, but there are other ways around this. It'd still be faster than a full NAND backup.

There's no access/created times etc on the ISFS is there?

You all seemed to miss this.
It'll be a nightmare to setup and it won't run efficiently without last modified dates on the files.