3DS Catch-all

I am posting to share my little tale of woe, and perhaps find some helpful tips, even.

Last week I installed homebrew on my 2DS XL and was having a blast adding things no longer available thanks to the eShop's closure, as well as fiddling around with other features like the custom themes. Last night, I was in the process of backing up my Micro SD card to one of my hard drives and the SD adapter seemed to fail, effectively corrupting the Micro SD. After spending a couple of hours trying to recover the files, only some of them were recoverable and thus my games and saves were now lost. I have been fiddling around getting the Micro SD card to be once again detectable by the DS, as it wasn't detecting it at all - I found that the recovery software repaired the card but made the partition a logical drive rather than the primary partition; I have corrected this but had to start working so haven't checked to see if the card is once again detectable.

Now, while I know I can re-download all I've purchased from the eShop in the past, and I have all the other goodies I installed after adding the Homebrew to the DS, my task now is, assuming the Micro SD card works again, to figure out how to add in all the Homebrew Software Apps (checkpoint, FBI, etc).

If anyone has had a similar experience, any helpful tips, steps, videos, what-have-you, would be very welcome. Right now I'm just bummed out hahaha Sure, there's definitely a solution, but I am still a bit deflated; I went from "Yay, it's like having a new system!" to "Craaaaaaaaaap, it's almost like having a bricked system!".

If you want to be paranoid you can make an image of your SD card in case it happens again. Get it the exact way you want. I use Refus and it’s good.

I use RUFUS a bit and had know idea either but I just looked it up.

I usually just use ImageUSB to make USB and SD card backups.

Try win32diskimager to pull an image.

I've done a fair amount of 3ds hacking. (We have 6 in our household) lucky I've had no SD card failures, but I have made a point of pulling an image everytime before making major changes and again after I finish. Probably not a huge help but a good lesson.
I also us a save game back up program and at this point use .cias for all of my games even ones I own from the eShop or game cards as I know that system better and can keep consistent game versions for all of my kids.
I started ripping our game cartridges years ago as I didn't trust my kids not to loose them...
One other thought is hopefully it is still in fat32 format as if that has changed it will also not work. I would also clone it over to a new card just in case the old one is damaged. I've done this several times as well.
I have will say I don't do much tinkering, just ripping with godmode9, installation with FBI, backups (sorry I can't remember the save manager name off the top of my head) and system/mod updates. I try to keep it simple and streamline for my kids.

Yeah, I try doing backups often but the SD card and/or the adapter failed. Just bad luck there, I guess.

Yeah, it's FAT32, but it does not recognize the card any longer. The card still funcions for storage on any computer, but the DS itself won't recognize it. Getting a card delivered later to replace it. It appears that sometimes cards can become corrupted and, from all the reading I've done for the past couple of days, there's not much that can be done at that point other than getting a new card.

If you remember the save manager's name, I'd appreciate it.

I have found a guide on what seems to be the same scenario I have, so once I get my new card, I'll follow it to see what I can get back from the backup files from luma and godmode9. Maybe I can recover some of my saves - I honestly haven't read up on what files are contained in said backups.

Thanks for all the suggestions, everyone

Making an image puts it all in one file, which can make transferring it to something like Dropbox quicker and easier, as well as ultimately restoring it to the same or another SD card. Also an image will include the file system, so for example if it's important that the SD card specifically is in Fat32 or NTFS or whatever, that will be carried over, saving you the step of reformatting the SD card into the proper file system before copying over the files. This can be important in complex use cases where, for example, the same drive might need multiple partitions with different file systems.

For example, I have a bootable USB thumb drive with Batocera Linux installed, so that I can plug it into any PC and boot from it to play emulated games. The thumb drive contains the boot partition, which is in a Linux file system that can't easily be read by Windows, and a storage partition that contains the game ROMs and can be read by Windows to easily facilitate loading games onto it. If I wanted to make a backup of that USB thumb drive, I would definitely want to do it by making an image, not just drag-and-dropping files.

I'm not sure how the file system is set up in an SD card for a jailbroken 3DS, but I'd be surprised if it didn't have some pretty strict requirements, so I'd feel way more comfortable backing it up as a disk image than just drag-and-dropping files.

JKSM is the one I used to use but, with an update a year ago I switched to Checkpoint.

Hope that helps. I'll also say I haven't played my 3ds much since I got my steam deck so I am a bit out of touch. Good luck.