Install backup files on your modded Nintendo Switch – Use DBI Installer to create and install game dump files

One of the most common uses for your modded Nintendo Switch is to be able to play games from backup files. This lets you backup your original game cartridges to a xci or nsp file which can then be installed onto your SD card to help preserve your physical media. Don’t forget that each time you plug your game cartridge into the card slot you add wear to both the card and the card reader! The backup files also mean that you can play your games on your computer using a suitable emulator.

Of course you can also use any backup file, not just your own legal ones, but do be aware that any software you acquire that you did not purchase yourself is covered by copyright law and that installing it onto your device will likely be breaking those laws. My advice is to stay clear of any game backup files that you cannot verify you are legally authorised to use. This video is in no way intended to show or encourage you do download copyrighted material.

But enough of the warnings and disclaimers and on to backing up your purchased games.

What You Need

Naturally you’ll need to have a modded Nintendo Switch to follow this tutorial. Either using the RCM hack or, as I have with my Switch, a modchip installed. If you’ve not yet modded your console check out my PicoFly installation video which lets you mod any Switch including the V1 and V2 motherboards, Lite and OLED models.

You’ll also need a USB C data cable to connect your Switch to your computer.

If you want to backup your original gamecards you’ll need those at the ready. Any eShop games we can get straight from the console.

Parts you’ll need :

SD card : https://amzn.to/4byjV2U

USB data cable : https://amzn.to/4t3mdOM

If you used my installation video and you used Sthetix’s HAT package you’ll already have all the software we’re going to use today. Otherwise you’ll need to download 2 bits of homebrew.

The first is the DBI app from this web address.

https://github.com/rashevskyv/dbi

This is going to do the main work for us. On the GitHub page you can read all about the application and how to use it, and most importantly, get a translation for the Russian menu text. The latest versions haven’t yet been translated to English so you’re going to have to learn a bit of Russian.

So head over to the latest releases section. Scroll down past the menu translation until you get to the Assets section and download the dbi.config file and DBI.nro file. Just drop them into a folder on your computer.

If you’re not happy with Russian and want to see the English menus then download the HATS package from

https://github.com/sthetix/HATS/releases

In the switch folder you’ll find a DBI_EN folder. This contains a very recent version of DBI with the menus translated. It will be a couple of months out of date but that won’t really matter.

DBI is a great application that makes dumping and installing your games as simple as dragging and dropping files.

To get our games to work from SD card we’ll also need to dump the product and title keys from our console. These are the key codes the Switch uses to unlock the game files. Again if you used Sthetix’s HATS pack you’ll already have the Lockpick payload we need. Otherwise head over to this web address

https://github.com/sthetix/Lockpick_RCM_Pro

Go to the releases section and download the Lockpick_RCM_Pro zip file. Once you save it to your computer unzip the archive into its own folder.

We now need to install the apps onto our Switch SD card.

Installing the Software

To copy the files over the easiest way is to boot the Switch into Hekate and then use the tools menu and USB tools to attach the Switch SD card to your computer. It’s tempting to just take the SD card out of the console each time but this does put unnecessary wear on the card socket so I tend to use the USB connection, especially when it’s just a few small files.

With the SD card now available on our computer we first need to install DBI. On your SD card go into the switch folder on the root and create a folder called DBI. Then copy the two DBI files we downloaded earlier into this folder. That’s DBI installed.

If you’re using a modchip on your console we can copy the Lockpick payload file to our SD card. Open up the zip archive you extracted earlier and go into the bootloader, payloads folder. There you’ll find a .bin file. This is the payload file. All you need to do is copy this file to the same location on your Switch SD card, so root, bootloader, payloads.

If you’re using an RCM hack we’ll be injecting this bin file to get the Lockpick code to run.

For now make sure you eject the SD card connection from your computer to safely disconnect from the Switch. We’re now ready to get everything set up.

Lockpick

First we need to run the Lockpick payload. If you’re using an RCM jig power down the console and put it into recovery mode. Then use your computer to inject the Lockpick .bin file as the payload. Lockpick should start on your Switch.

If you’re using a modchip console go to the main Hekate screen and select payloads. Scroll the list until you find Lockpick and select it.

Lockpick lets you do a number of tasks, but for the moment we just want to dump from our sysMMC. This will save a few files onto our SD card, but the main ones we need are the prod.keys file and the title.keys file which will be saved into the switch folder.

Once that’s complete press any key to go back to the main menu and then select the reboot to Hekate option. If you’re on an RCM console you’ll need to inject your Hekate payload.

sysMMC or emuMMC

To dump your games you need to be in an environment with access to the game data. Remember that you can launch into either sysMMC or emuMMC. If you’re dumping a game from the Nintendo store you’ll want to be in sysMMC. If it’s a game you’ve installed from a backup file then you’ll want to be in emuMMC.

For this tutorial I’ll be launching into sysMMC with CFW to dump my bought games from both my gamecard and eShop.

As a basic rule I tend to stick to emuMMC when doing any homebrew as this removes any chance of dirtying my sysMMC NAND with detectible activity that might get my console banned. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t run some homebrew code safely on sysMMC. Generally, as long as you don’t install any unofficial software, and this includes using backup copies of your legally purchased games, you’re fine. There are some homebrew apps that will leave bad traces but if you limit your sysMMC activity to known safe apps you’ll be fine. DBI is a safe app to use for game dumping – NOT game installing. Just to drive the message home NEVER install backup files of any type on your sysMMC environment.

Dumping a Game

I’m in my sysMMC with CFW. On the main menu I have a gamecard plugged in with a Legend of Zelda game and a number of eShop games installed to my internal NAND. To dump the games open your album to bring up the homebrew menu. Go over to your DBI installer app. If you’ve used the HATS package you’ll have 2 versions. The first is usually the latest version in Russian, the second will be the slightly older version in English. I’ll be using the latest Russian text version so I can show you how to navigate that.

When it opens you’ll be greeted with a blue text based interface. If I bring up the menu translations which you’ll find on the DBI releases page where we downloaded it from, we need to scroll down to the configuration menu which should be 2 from the bottom ending in DBI.

Select that and we’ll get a long list of settings. There isn’t a translation for these but we only need to check a couple which are luckily in English. Scroll down to the second MTP section where you’ll see these options. This lets you expose certain parts of your Switch to the MTP server so we can copy files across. Just set everything to YES by selecting the option and press the A button until the Da on the right is highlighted in grey.

Now click the B button to go back to the main menu.

There are a number of ways of transferring files between your computer and Switch. If you remember back to setting up your SD card partitions you might remember creating an FAT32 partition for your files. This is the best option but it does impose a 4GB limit on file sizes. With Switch games we’ll be working with files up to 16GB or more in size. This can be an issue with some file transfer methods where you have to break big files up into smaller pieces to make them fit onto the FAT32 file system and then rebuild them later.

But luckily DBI uses an MTP server. This is a Media Transfer Protocol system which handles all of that breaking up and rebuilding for you. It will make more sense when we start it up.

On the main menu you’ll see an MTP option about 6 from the bottom. Select that. This will start the MTP server on the Switch and it will now be looking for a USN connection to your computer. Plug that in and we can move over to the PC.

On your computer you should have a Switch drive attached to your file explorer system. This is the MTP server running on the Switch. Open that up and you’ll see a range of drives. These represent parts of the Switch filing system. They are not the actual SD card files, but virtual versions where the files have been rebuilt to get around this 4GB file size limit.

One of the drives will be the Installed Games drive. Open that up.

In there you’ll find all the games currently installed on your console. If you have a look at some of the files you’ll notice that they are bigger that what should be possible. For example my Mario Cart 8 .nsp file is 11.2GB.

What’s happening here is that the MTP system acts as an interface between your computer and the Switch. On the Switch the game contains a whole range of separate files all designed to fit inside the 4GB file size limit. The MTP server understands that this collection of files makes up a game and presents it to us as a single file. To dump a game all we need to do is copy this single virtual file to our computer by simply dragging and dropping it into a folder.

Behind the scenes the MTP server is building the .nsp backup file on the fly as it sends the data across to our computer so that we get the full game backup as a single .nsp file.

And that is our game fully dumped from our console.

Inside the Installed Games drive you’ll see each game in the root folder. These are the combined files where DBI has packaged the base game along with any DLC and Updates into one download.

If you want to access the individual parts open up the folder for your game. Inside there you’ll find a file for each part. So here in my Just Dance folder we’ve got the base game at V0, an update file and 3 DLC files. Again you can just copy these to your computer.

If we now go back up to the root of our Switch drive you’ll see a Gamecard drive. This will only appear if you have a card plugged into your console. If I open that up you’ll see two .xci files.

One is labelled as a trimmed version, one not.

Both are full versions of the game. The trimmed version has had any blank data removed from the file. The Gamecards have a fixed amount of data space inside them. The software doesn’t always fill the entire memory space so there can be blank areas. The trimmed file just removes this to keep the file size smaller.

For DBI and other MTP based systems on the Switch, and for emulators such as Eden the trimmed files are fine. If you’re using something like a MIG Flashcart or another game installer that needs the full card structure kept intact then use the untrimmed version.

As I’ll be installing this backup using DBI I’m going to copy over the trimmed version.

So that’s dumping games covered!

Just press B on your Switch to close the MTP server and B again to exit from DBI.

Installing Game Backup Files

First we need to make sure we are not using sysMMC. If you are ever about to install a game from a backup file always boot back to Hekate and make sure you’re using the emuMMC. It’s so easy to forget this stage and it’s hard to see what environment you’re currently in so just get into the habit of specifically launching into emuMMC before any installations.

Once in emuMMC we need to go back to DBI and start up our MTP server as before.

Back on our computer we just open up the Switch drive and look in the root. Here you should see two install drives. One will install games to your SD card, one will install them to your emuMMC NAND.

All we need to do to install a game is to copy our backup files into the relevant install folder. So here I’m going to install my Legend of Zelda .xci file onto my SD card. If you’ve got separate DLC or update files just copy them in exactly the same way.

Again the MTP server is going to handle all of the game file preparation. All I do is copy the 6GB file to the folder. This starts to transfer the game data to the Switch. But the MTP server acts as the interface, breaking up the game as it’s transferred so that it can be saved onto the SD card and then installing the files so we can play the game.

Once that’s transferred over we can close the MTP server on the Switch and exit out of DBI.

Back on our main menu we should see our game. If I run that we’ve now got our copy of Zelda running from our SD card so I can safely pack my gamecard away for safe keeping.

Conclusion

So that’s dumping and installing games with DBI. The MTP server makes the whole process so easy. DBI can also be used to install games from other sources so I’ll be covering that in some upcoming videos.