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Your Save Data Is Not Safe On the Nintendo Switch (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a post-launch update to our initial Nintendo Switch review, we noted that there is no way to externally back up game save data stored on the system. A recent horror story from a fellow writer who lost dozens of hours of game progress thanks to a broken system highlights just how troublesome this missing feature can be. Over at GamesRadar, Anthony John Agnello recounts his experience with Nintendo support after his Switch turned into a useless brick for no discernible reason last week (full disclosure: I know Agnello personally and have served with him on some convention panels). After sending his (under warranty) system to Nintendo for repair, Agnello received a fixed system and the following distressing message from the company two days later: "We have inspected the Nintendo Switch system that was sent to us for repair and found that the issue has made some of the information on this system unreadable. As a result, the save data, settings, and links with any Nintendo Accounts on your system were unable to be preserved." Agnello says he lost 55 hours of progress on The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, as well as more progress on a few other downloadable games. While he was able to redownload the games that were deleted, he'd have to start from scratch on each one (if only all that progress was easily, instantly unlockable in some way...)
Thanks to President Trump and his wall, America will once again be great again.
that Oh the Horror!!!!! these days is losing some hours of game play. Back in the day when we use to walk in the snow for hours (Yes we did) to rent Sega and Nintendo games and welcomed things crashing and deleting data so that we can stay up all night building up Nintendo thumbs.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Having backup is _the_ core approach to keeping data safe. I really do not understand why "designers" keep messing this up. Maybe these are people that never had a disk crash or are having all their own things in the cloud, but even then this is a very basic and very stupid mistake to make. It is also something any good IT systems engineering or IT security consultant would have asked after and pointed out, so I guess they thought they do not need any outside review in order to not miss things. That universally fails, because one thing any good engineer knows is that while you are in the heat of the design process, you miss things that outsiders will see.
The bottom line is that the people that designed this are mediocre and it is very likely that using good people instead would have hat huge economic benefits.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
it's an obsolete tablet with the worst online experience of all the consoles and now you can't even save your games. and i hear the digital game purchases are tied to physical consoles. my xbox one i can delete a game, install it again and my saves will be there
Having been on the fence about whether or not to get a Switch, this is the news that settles my decision on "hell no". The inability to back up saved games would have been somewhat tolerable if the storage medium were reliable, but clearly it is not. There's no way I'm going to risk having all my progress thrown to the four winds.
Here's what I really don't understand: saved games are small, and Nintendo presumably has capable servers because it offers downloadable games. Steam has shown us that it's perfectly reasonable to ask that the service you download your games from also back up your saves, because it's a huge benefit to the gamers at a miniscule cost to the company. Does Nintendo really not give a damn about their customers?
Not sure what I would do if I lost my progress with Zelda after playing 60 hours. I love the game but probably wouldn't be inclined to try and recover it. Nintendo should at least offer a few 'default' progress positions for consoles affected.
I know that _I_ have been quite impressed that the Wii U and PS3 games still have to have a little interstitial screen to say "When you see this animation, for dog's sake do not power down your system!", just like the NES had. So this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
I guarantee you that it bricked because of a brownout or other such power fluctuation that caused the console to reboot while it was patching. This also happened to Wii-U users.
...with any company.
Either they're in the data business and their aim is to exploit your data for money - that's almost all companies that happen to have any software in their product line these days - or they're incompetent to safeguard data even if they're not crooked, or both. Most likely both.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
potAto poTAHto toMATo toMAHto
WAAHHH WAHHH I hate nintendo sooo much mommy WAHHH I'm gonna make a scene about every fart they let out WAHHHH
That's what most of this comment section is gonna be.
... that gamergate shit?
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The struggle is real.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
A recent horror story from a fellow writer who lost dozens of hours of game progress thanks to a broken system
I remember a time where saving functions did not exist at all. It was still fun to play video games.
No save, but some games gave you codes to skip first levels when you completed them, though.
Horror is relative. Its possible for both to be a horror.
I guarantee you that it bricked because of a neutrino from the interior of the Sun that God had sent to take out Trump and the goddam thing missed and shit.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
This only proves how cobbled together the switch is. Who games that doesn't want some sort of reasonable ability to save games and back them up? Does anyone at Nintendo play games anymore? Wasn't planning on buying a Switch and it wouldn't surprise me if it becomes a nightmare for Nintendo.
"Just like the NES had"? How old are you? NES, SNES, PSX, N64, hell even most PS2 and Gamecube games didn't have that sort of thing.
You do understand this is a portable device with a built in battery? You know, because portable...
The Mideast is, has been, and always will be a "horror story" (at least until the day when they all somehow get nukes and solve the problem themselves or global warming makes it an uninhabitable wasteland and the Horror Story pulls up stakes and moves north en masse to Europe). Nothing is novel or interesting about that.
Americans care about shit that happens to Americans; that's how it works. It's why 3,000 people dying on 9/11 on live TV was the end of the goddamned world but 250,000 dying in the Christmas Tsunami three years later was good for maybe a week of news coverage. It's why you only care about the situation in Yemen because it gives you an angle to attack Trump.
Deal with it.
A horror story is the Holocaust. Now Yemen doesn't qualify either!
Yeh, that tiny lack of a feature you'd never use is stopping you buying a Nintendo Switch, not the price. Not because you're locked into an XBox, no... the inability to backup to PC...
Methinks XBox man doth protest tooooooo much.
Permadeath is permanent. Your character is dead, and your save file is deleted automatically. Start over from the beginning. NetHack doesn't stop you from making backups of your save files, but the practice is called savescumming, because if you do it, you're scum.
Closest I can think of is the "Hold select while powering off" thing for save games.
Nobody got unauthorized access to his data, so it's perfectly safe. As for data loss, if you are prohibited from transferring your data, then going in you should assume you could lose all your data. This applies to all devices, not just consoles.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
so what's this John complaining about with his few hours of gameplay?
Thanks for blindly picking up this system and going through all the growing pains so the rest of us don't have to. Meanwhile I'll just be playing Zelda on my Wii U and waiting for Switch price drops and bundles to come around by the time all the bugs have been worked out.
Why aren't saves stored on the cartridge like any other cartridge system? I can understand why it would be stored on the system for digital versions but not physical... How are you supposed access your save when you put the cartridge in another system?
So this is definitely inconvenient. Now, that's out of the way lets put this in perspective. You're not losing your PhD project, or mission critical data. Your losing some save data if, just if, there is a problem with that part of the system. This shouldn't be a deal breaker unless there are reports of this becoming a widespread problem. But again, the real problem there is that they sold you a faulty product, and not that you lost some game progress.
Ladies and gentlemen, that girl you wish you hadn't started a conversation with at the party!
-
If my PS4 dies, won't my saves die with it? If there is a way to copy them off, I have never bothered to do so. NEWS!
there is no way to move saves off the device or even to the memory card - which is really puzzling.
It's because Nintendo's past consoles were jailbroken through the savegame system. Google keywords: Wii Twilight Hack, Wii Smash Stack, 3DS ninjhax
Not a one NES game had that. And what does that icon have to do with losing data after a warranty repair? Or anything else for that matter?
Most NES games with a battery, starting with later printings of The Legend of Zelda, had a warning to hold Reset while turning off the power. One problem was that as the NES CPU lost power, its bus drivers couldn't hold the address bus stable, possibly causing writes to internal work RAM to be redirected to save RAM instead. Holding Reset froze the CPU, ensuring that no stray writes to the wrong address could cause the save data to become corrupt.
Some later mappers had more sophisticated write protection circuitry, but there still wasn't always enough memory to make saving an atomic transaction. StarTropics for NES had explicit warnings against turning off the power while saving was in progress.
The wording in the PS2 era was to the effect "Now saving. Please do not remove the Memory Card (8 MB) (for PlayStation®2) or turn off the power."
Is that still critical or did they fix it?
Not the expensive cheap tablet with broken pixels?
Not the horrible ergonomics of the pads ?
Not the price of said pads compared to, say, a PS4 one ?
Not the price of a stupid bit of plastic to hold them together ?
No, just the fact that Nintendo does not provide a way to backup save-games.
When was the last time you did backup a game on a PSx or XBox ? (I do, but I'm weird or so I've been told)
Taking game software alone, you have lots of space, yet most save mechanisms arbitrarily restrict the number of saves? And wider scope, We've all lost copious amounts of web form data. Microsoft has a memory limitation called a desktop heap that the recommended and default size on modern machines is absurdly small and results in data loss. For that matter, Windows Updaye is oblivious to what is happening on the machine and has no regard for data preservation.
"Windows Updaye is oblivious to what is happening on the machine and has no regard for data preservation."
That was a huge nail in Windows' coffin as far as I'm concerned. The last and final nail was Windows 10 uploading of user data. They lost a customer for life.
I am just waiting for this second turd of a console to explode and then hopefully I can play their first party game ports on my Xbone or PS4. They lost me as a console customer when they made the WiiU and the Switch just doubles down on a series of terrible ideas.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
It's why you only care about the situation in Yemen because it gives you an angle to attack Trump.
Deal with it.
As useless a cunt as Trump is, GP did not mention him, and Yemen pre-dates him by quite a stretch.
You must perceive 'attacks' on your orange hero constantly. "horrific".
Sad?
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Still qualifies. As does Syria under Assad.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
man the memories.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
"Yemen" is fake news.
Luckily, President Trump is building a wall to keep out the fake stories about "Yemen".
No sig today...
I thought the same as another poster above - this isn't a "horror" story, the author of the summary or article is an idiot.
You're surprised it's in consoles? hell, it's in PC ports of console games, as if unexpectedly powering off one's pc was something people usually did
Hyperbole is a thing.
+5 Funny for the assumption that most Slashdotters would start a conversation with a girl.
In my experience, console gaming only gets convinient when I have an emulator for it. Then I can backup whatever the hell I want on my own terms and responsibility. Its only gets worse with modern walled-garden consoles, where developers go out of ther way to make everything incompatible with everything else.
:(
Yeah i realize that chance that ps3 or ps4 going to get emulated (to a playable degree) are slim to none, but chances are that anything worth its weight in package plastic will get ported to pc a few years later anyway, despite being $console_name-exclusive upon release, like it happens to ps-exclusive FF series. Latest installments of FF kinda suck though, but that's another story...
I still have those Planescape: Torment saves (along with entire game) lying on that nas, waiting for when i finally find the time to continue playing. I`ve been putting it off for 4 years now
There have been worse horrors than Yemen. What's your point?
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/N...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
LOLOLOLOLOLOL "ORANGE" XDDDDD
how do i get as clever and original as you?
Aww, you poor thing. Who shat in your meusli today?
As useless a cunt as Trump is, GP did not mention him, and Yemen pre-dates him by quite a stretch.
You must perceive 'attacks' on your orange hero constantly. "horrific".
While it's true that Yemen predates Trump's presidency, practically no one in the US ever talked about Yemen until Trump took office. It's as if the media is suddenly willing to divulge all the shitty things the US government does now that there's a president they don't like, and as it's not enough they add (to date) baseless accusations of racism/misogyny/Russia ties every single day to the cabinet members they dislike.
While I don't find him to be amazing by any stretch, it's amazing how he's vilified for doing, or at least attempting, everything he said he would do on the campaign trail while his predecessors got away with doing many similar things. It's the double standard that bothers and scares me.
Nintendo understands that they don't get 'infrastructure' which is why they handled mobile conglomerate DeNA to build all that for them. So I guess DeNA too doesn't get 'infrastructure', or maybe this has something to do with Japanese expectations and preferences for such?
Twinstiq, game news
Fear of people hacking save states, dissecting ROMs and the like, which is a rampant problem on all their other mobile platforms which by the way share similar asinine "protections" that are almost always broken immediately.
In Nintendo's mind their biggest competitors are hackers and they put in all sorts of draconian measures to ensure the only people who pay (repeatedly) are legit consumers.
Hell, Mario Maker was a direct response to the growing popularity of custom Mario romhacks, again pirates came up with a popular idea that they turned around and milked while slapping any website hosting roms with waves of litigation, like they did with YouTube let's players for years (because you might just watch somebody play Zelda rather than buy it?).
You'd think the tiny dull lightbulb would go on at some point but it just never does, and they'll keep selling Super Mario Bros 3 over and over on every console you buy while using the profits to fund the War on People Who Don't Buy Their Shit Anyway
I'm sick of giving them money to watch them
1. Half-ass it
2. Fleece legit customers
3. Hassle their fans
As opposed to Syria under who, exactly?
Fomenting and funding from abroad a war in Syria, then blaming Assad for the horrors of the war is not very serious. So, you can attack a sovereign country indirectly by means of proxy war, guerilla warfare then blame the country for defending itself.
In this the more horrors, the more US and France and the guerilla's press services can denounce horrors, war crimes, human rights situation, and ask for more war. So these countries, which are otherwise fine with the media giving no attention to wars they agree with (Yemen etc.), politically benefit from horrors. The more horrors, the more sales of weapons, bombs, war planes.
I wish Assad wins the war, so that the human rights situation can improve. Opposition is a bit too obsessed about genocide against Shia, a side effect of the Saudi-manufactured jihad war ideology.
Human rights themselves are a bit discredited now, that's another cost of using the notion of human rights to make unneeded war.
See DPRK's reaction to the UN report on human rights for instance, there's worse human rights there than in pre-war Syria but now we can't do anything about it anymore. Perhaps wait three decades and see what happens.
That's 55 hours of his life he's not getting back anyway.
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
There is one:
App save data is deleted when you delete the app!
There are ways around this, like extracting an app's saved data from your backup or if you are lucky the app's creators let you export via iTunes File Sharing/etc. But right now, if you want to easily keep your saves, you have to keep the app installed.
That being said, I would have loved to see Switch handles for iPad and more games from Nintendo on that platform.
"There are people who do not love their fellow human being, and I _hate_ people like that!" - Tom Lehrer
So cloud saves are the best thing ever, but most small developers can't just throw it into their game without some bigger infrastructure (Sony, Steam, etc.) The idea is to build some sort of API that cloud services could follow, that would allow applications to backup their data to your personal (or paid-for) cloud. You would configure it for an application (game, entire os, etc.) by providing your address/username/password or some other method of authentication. The storage would provide a small amount (customizable?) of private storage to this game/service/whatever where it could read and write to. The api should provide mechanisms for dealing with conflicts and purging old version of data, and in this specific example, calls to automatically sync and restore save data.
I figure this would be great for things like emulators, drm free games, and game consoles that don't want to provide their own mechanisms (Nintendo).
was lost. WTF /. srsly.
Because many living in one country, cannot just hop on a plane to help those in another country.
And this is a technical forum. So the stories will often be about tech, this is not to mean readers have no global awareness.
This is normal for a website to stick to its own themes don't you think? Should a website for exercise & health be accused of uncaring for war-torn families?
(this post authored by someone who HAS been to and helped such war torn families. I come here to get a different & relaxing theme, ok?)
007 373 5963
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
Seriously? My god some people are entitled, little shits. It's a fucking video game! Back when I played (as a kid—you know, the appropriate age), neither my NES nor Super NES had a way to backup saved game stats. If you lost it, who cares? Again, it's just a *video game*. What is happening to this world?
Nintendo should be charging extra. Look at it this way, that's 55 more hours playing Zelda than he'd normally get. 55 extra hours of gameplay, all at no additional cost!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
With 3 hours battery life, plastic screen, and too big for your pocket? No you don't.