Topic: A question of saves and hard drives

If I've missed an answer to this someone can point me to, that would be awesome, but I couldn't find anything with exactly my problem.

One of my downloaded games (BIT.TRIP RUNNER 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, if you must know) has been somehow corrupted on the 500 gigabyte external hard drive currently connected to my Wii U. I've already beaten the game, so it's not an immediately pressing issue, but it's one I'd like to replay and the thought of having a broken game on my system menu bugs me. The game can't be played in any capacity and the system will not allow me to delete it from the hard drive, transfer it to the system memory or redownload it from the eShop, so I'm stuck. I'm sure that reformatting the hard drive would get rid of it and let me redownload a working copy of the game from the eShop, but that's where my real problem comes in.

I have a scores of games on the system, with save data for each one that I'd rather not lose. What I'd optimally like to do is dump ALL the files onto my computer, pull out and delete the corrupted game's file, reformat the external hard drive, dump all the remaining files back onto it, plug it back into the Wii U, redownload BIT.TRIP, and be good as new.

But what I need to know is if this is actually possible, and, if not, what are my alternatives?

From my understanding, The Wii U data is in a format that a PC can't understand. What you can do is connect another drive to the Wii U and transfer all the data there. What's left remaining that can't transfer will be reformatted when you do do it. As a side note: I hear in linux you can clone the drive if you ever need to have a backup.

** a suggestion also would be to move the data, reformat to NTFS or something temporarily and check the integrity of the drive to make sure it's not in any danger of failing anytime soon. Sometimes a corruption is the first sign. It's just a precaution IMO.

So the best thing to do is buy an entirely new, second hard drive and slowly transfer data from the first to the system memory then to the second, a few files at a time?

That's not what I wanted to hear. It's better than the whole hard drive dying and losing all of my saves, I guess, but still, that's gonna be a long, expensive process.

I believe you can copy saves individually from the HDD to the internal memory, format the HDD, move the saves back over to the reformatted HDD, redownload the games onto the HDD and the saves should be correctly associated with their games.

i really wish the Wii U would just store saves in internal memory and games on the external drive. it would make things much easier

Yeah, I should try that first. My only worry was that with the large number of games I have, I may not have enough room on the system memory for all of the saves.

It does depend on how many games you have the amount of time a drive cool will take. The Wii U's continued use of USB2 is the big bottleneck here so if you've got a couple hundred GB of games then it will take a few hours. Get a portable drive and y-cable/powered hub to reduce the expense of the hardware - backups are a lot less time intensive than losing save data and re-downloading everything!

Ugh, that sucks. But that's good advice and I think I'll do it this week.

For the future, is there anything I may have done wrong to cause the file to die? How can I avoid this happening again with my next hard drive?

(By the way, the one I'm using is a portable drive with a Y cable.)

There could be many reasons why this might have happened, but I would say your best bet to minimise the chance of file corruption is to always close a game via the Home Menu before powering off - don't power off the Wii U directly from a game.