Interesting. Perhaps they forgot how to shut down the servers?
No, they never said that they were closing, just that the ability to buy new licenses will be disabled
You can still redownload anything you own (or don't, given tickets are not required for downloading...)
I doubt they will remove them before 2 years from today (European warranty, right to have a repair/replacement/refund at the seller's discretion, ya know): even for the DSi they only claimed redownloads for barely a year but they are still up
I am doing backups before the servers shut down in a couple of days of anything I might need in the future (like IOS files). One question I have, should I keep the raw download or just the decrypted .app files? As I understand they are encrypted with the common and title key? Is there anything these days that can't be decrypted and for that reason one should keep the raw download? I know that used to be the case awhile back where a few titles had problems, but I am guessing that has been fixed?
Also the decryption process will still work after the servers shut down correct? Or is there a server aspect to the decryption process that I am unaware of?
Oh and I assume if I ran into something where there was a problem with the decryption, it would give me obvious errors?
Titles are encrypted with a titlekey (which is written, itself encrypted with 1 of the 3 common keys, in the ticket - and so is the number of the common key to use)
If you have a wad you have the contents + tmd + ticket; add the common keys and you have everything you need to install or extract that title
For any title, contents and tmd are public
For "free drm" titles (the ones that are green in nus downloader) there's also a public "cetk" (probably meaning something like "common encrypted ticket"?) which is, indeed, a ticket;
for the orange ones there's no such thing and you would need to add a real ticket (which can be dumped from a console or downloaded if you manage to spoof console authentication), a real ticket that has been edited to be valid for all consoles then truchasigned, or (in theory, simply because there's no such tool for the Wii I know of) a completely made up ticket from titleid+titlekey (does that remind you of anything?)