I’ve sometimes made the point that I think using custom firmware on the Nintendo 3DS makes the console safer than one without. Since this point might seem confusing to those who deal with hacking/jailbreaking/rooting other consoles or devices, I want to outline why I think this is so.

Back up games, saves, and system storage

This is probably the most obvious one, it provides the ability to back up your games and saves (whether digital or game cards), plus the system storage (a.k.a. NAND). That protects you in cases like lost SD card, accidental deletion, or random corruption. Especially as SD cards are not perfectly reliable.

With a stock console, you’re able to copy the contents of the SD card to another device. This works as a very simple backup, but it comes with some caveats:

• The contents of the saves cannot be accessed. If the console itself is lost, damaged, or formatted, the saves are as good as gone.¹ Even with game cards, some games store “extra data” on the SD card, which is just as tied to the console as digital games. In a few cases such as Fantasy Life, the save isn’t on the game card at all.
• Some games implement anti-restore features, such as Pokémon and Animal Crossing. Trying to restore an old backup will cause these games to refuse to load without either the newest save being loaded, or the save being erased.

Protect your console and saves from bricks

There are a few ways that a console can stop turning on. Software-wise, the most common methods usually involve messing with system files.

But wait, isn’t that something you can only do with homebrew? Yes, that’s something that one couldn’t do without already having custom firmware. However, there are still ways for a console that has never ran any form of homebrew to break itself:

• System save problems: On occasion, a system save might get corrupted or for some other reason break in a way that prevents the console from booting. This happened to mine in early 2015. My then-completely-stock console would no longer boot to the HOME Menu. It would turn on to a black screen, while pressing POWER would show the power off screen. I eventually sent it in for Nintendo repairs. I later found out that this was due to some system save or extra data related to the HOME Menu got some kind of issue, since I saw it come up on other consoles.²
• Hardware failure: Various components of the console can fail at any point, seemingly at random. While some of these are not necessarily catastrophic failures (i.e. camera failure simply blocks camera features in games), some can render a console unusable. RAM failure is perhaps the most devastating, as it is something that requires an entire console replacement (or at least the motherboard), and can hardly be influenced by the user or software.

A console with access to tools like GodMode9 is able to fix software-related problems, while make backups in certain cases of hardware failure. But even when parts like RAM or displays are broken, there are specialized dumping tools like DannyAAM’s 3DS essential file dumper, that works on any modded console that is able to power on in any form. This would enable transferring data to another console.

Now a stock console is not completely without options. ntrboot can be used to boot into custom payloads on any 3DS with a working game card slot. While this is a solution to either fix a software-related brick, or to make backups from one with hardware failures, it requires the purchase of a compatible Nintendo DS flashcart.

There are literally no practical downsides

This is not like jailbreaking or hacking most other consoles – custom firmware on the Nintendo 3DS does not inherently break anything. All games work just as well as before. System updates are safe (though it seems unlikely Nintendo will ever release another one). When these services were fully available, Nintendo eShop and online play were fully functional, no spoofing or workarounds required.

(If it’s not clear enough, you should totally hack your 3DS. There’s a reason that “modding a 3DS is surprisingly easy” is a popular meme, it’s because it’s true.)

Notes

1. Technically, it is possible to recover saves using seedminer, if another 3DS had the console in question added as a friend. But this is not guaranteed – the other console needs to run homebrew, and even then, seedminer does not have a 100% success rate. ↩︎
2. Specifically, the f000000b system extdata. ↩︎