VGPolyglot said:
Nintendo slacking off so badly that they need one of the other console makers to do work for their D: |
"As much as I love the Switch, Nintendo's portable console is still flawed. As we all know it lacks the ability for users to back up their game data to an SD card or transfer those saves to a PC. While certain hacking groups are working successfully to open up the Switch to homebrew (and potential piracy), one hacker devoted his efforts to solving this lack of functionality"
Computer engineer Bernardo Giordano created the solution in about 2 weeks according to Kotaku. He's also known for developing "Checkpoint," a file manager for Nintendo 3DS, which probably contributed to that short development window.
In a tweet earlier this week, Giordano said "Seems that we successfully performed save backup and restore operations directly on #NintendoSwitch through Checkpoint! Source code will be available sometime this year (with some goodies coming for the Nintendo 3DS version) on https://t.co/w8lr6hi4DH." [Author's note: The Twitter short url is safe and leads to his 3DS "Checkpoint" software on Github]
Giordano provided Kotaku with proof-of-work via these two images showing the save manager in action which looks fairly simple to operate.
The Switch community has been badgering Nintendo to provide a backup save solution for their games, and that's a reasonable expectation for any console. Especially since using some 3rd party charging peripherals for the Switch can brick your system, resulting in 80 hour Breath of the Wild and Skyrim saves being wiped from existence. Even if a Switch system is damaged beyond repair by other means, that data is gone forever.
The obvious question here is this: if a hacker did this in a matter of weeks, why hasn't Nintendo released an official solution (other than transferring from Switch to Switch) more than a year into the console's existence? Giordano gave Kotaku some solid speculation: “It’s something that isn’t really in the interests of the company,” he said. “They generally don’t want people to mess with their saves to avoid hackers to find a way to penetrate the system, which is totally reasonable.”
