Thanks so much. Every bit helps. I noticed only 4 people dumped their 3DS data and 0 people dumped their Wii U data in the past couple of hours, so there’s going to be a very small amount of extra dumps by Apr 8th at this rate. I’m gonna continue sharing as much as I can. I was gonna go share on r/technology on Reddit, but saw that one of their rules explicitly forbids posts that are a “call to action”. What a stupid rule, why even stipulate that?

Edit: Ignore this comment, what I said is completely wrong. I’m sorry if I inconvenienced anyone and wasted your time dumping a console with nothing on it.

Probably not. Unless you bought it second-hand? Apparently the data still remains on the system even if it’s reset, so if you bought your console pre-owned, or was given it by a friend, there may still be a large amount of data still there in the background.

Worth a dump, I think. I dumped my modded secondary console which is an OG 2DS which I also hardly ever use, just in case there was something there.

Don’t worry. There’s heaps of testimony in these comments that it only took them a matter of minutes.

Hey. Gotten around to it yet? Just checking in with a few of the “I’ll do it later posts”.

Huh. Thanks for letting me know that. I’ve had quite a few people ask me this question and I’ve linked them the same image again but didn’t know people were having trouble loading it. Well, the image is a Discord message in the server which reads:

"-obligatory not a dev team member- It is dumpable after the 8th, however, the data this project uses is not the dumped data of the spotpass, but rather the url that leads to the source of the SpotPass (i.e. nintendo or 3rd party servers that distributed spotpass data). You can dump the data still, however, the servers will be gone after April 8th, and as such, submitting the dump would indeed be useless after April 8th.

The data submitted carries a very slim chance, (~10) of actually including sensitive information, however this is due to a system level flaw of the system itself. (Nintendo messed up while coding) It includes a bit of data which is whatever the nand was processing at the time of the dump. Most of the time this is garbage data, and nothing private. The dev team automatically anonymises all the data however, and it is not recommended to ever share your dump data outside of the dev team. (Without previous discussion at least.)

To summarise, the date is when the servers shut down, the url of which is what we are extracting from the spotpass dumps, the team is then accessing those servers to get all the spotpass data they can from there. There is a sub 10% chance of the dump containing any personal info, and as such the dev ream anonymises any and all dumps that are submitted.

Hope that helps, I’ll link a message with a more in depth explanation if necessary."

Also, let me know if the link works now. I accidentally shared a private link, so it should work now. Let me know, thanks.

The data on your console is just a url address that points at a Nintendo server. That server is going offline. So if we don’t get the url before it goes offline, we can’t download the url.

Thanks for that. Edit: Sorry, just found out I was wrong about notifications in the paragraph below. They technically are sent through SpotPass, but the process of archiving them, while theoretically possible, is a bit more complicated, and there isn’t enough time left to start developing a method now.

I don’t know this for sure, but I think that your news notifications are archived as well, as I’m pretty sure they were all received through SpotPass; so while that’s not exactly game content, it’s still something else.

Hey, just letting you know that there’s less then 33 hrs remaining at the time of writing.

Hey, you looked further into getting it done yet? I’ve had a lot of “I’ll do it later” posts, so just checking in on some people.

I just donated mine and there doesn’t seem to be one. Try to go to a computer store, SD card adapters aren’t very expensive these days. P.S. I just remembered it uploads automatically if you’re connected to the internet

Hey, just checking in and seeing if you remembered to make your dump yesterday? Just in case you forgot.

SpotPass was/is a free service provided by Nintendo that was only on the 3DS and Wii U consoles; Nintendo Switch doesn’t provide this. Essentially what it’s purpose was, was for Nintendo to send various pieces of content to players for their games and apps. For example, Tomodatchi Life had various time-limited costumes distributed to players on a half-monthly bases. This was some of the data I had on my console. Other examples include special distributions of special Pokemon in pokemon games. So, in a sense, you could call the SpotPass data “DLC’s”. That’s why they are important to preserve, as they are DLC content that was distributed for free. They also include notifications, since all the notifications sent to you were through SpotPass. There’s also some DLC’s for New Super Mario Bros. 2 that require you to receive a SpotPass notification in order to install.

My version of a TLDR:

Spotpass is a wireless tech that would auto connect with other 3ds or Wii U systems that were in the immediate area albeit with a limited range. It was their way of having a social community. Sort of like how you might meet other people while walking around outside.

In the case of Spotpass, when you connected, it would show you the user’s profile, their favorite games, etc. And in some cases for specific games it would provide special DLCs or content that cannot be found elsewhere.

Hence why we’d want to preserve that data since some DLC and other features are exclusive to Spotpass.