Managing Wii Backups

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This guide provides instructions on how to manage your Wii backups, from joining .PART files that are output through CleanRip, to shrinking game files that can be copied onto a FAT32 device. Two programs that can be used to manage your Wii backups are Wii Backup Manager (for Windows) and Wii Backup Fusion (for Linux and MacOS) and are covered below.

For storing multiple games, we recommend an external hard drive for your Wii. Most of those found on the market should work fine.

A flash drive is not recommended, as they are small and may vary in behavior even between the same product.
As an alternative, you may simply use an SD card, however the Wii’s SD card slot will be slow.

Make sure your USB drive is formatted as FAT32. Do not format it as other types such as exFAT, extFS.
You may format it as NTFS, but it won’t work with a majority of apps (eg. The Homebrew Channel, Nintendont)

Joining PART files on a FAT32 device

If your disc was dumped to a FAT32 device, you should have gotten at least two files that end with .partX.iso, due to filesystem limitations. They need to be joined (on a supported filesystem like NTFS) so the file can be read correctly.

Windows

  1. Copy the files that share the same name and end with .partX.iso into an empty folder on your computer.

  2. In this folder, click the address bar in Windows Explorer and type in cmd, this will open a command prompt window there.

  3. Type copy /b *.part?.iso game.iso and press enter. Wait for the command to finish, your terminal output should be similar to the below.

  4. If the copy process executed correctly, the checksum from the game dump info file (located where you dumped your disc at) should match the resulting joined file.

macOS/Linux

  1. Copy the files that share the same name and end with .partX.iso into an empty folder on your computer.

  2. Open a terminal in the directory where your files are at, or cd [PATH] to it.

  3. Use the following command as is: cat `ls *.part?.iso | sort` > game.iso. Then, wait for the merging process to finish. Like in Windows, the resulting checksum should match the dump.

Using Wii Backup Manager

Requirements

  • A PC running Windows
  • A USB drive or SD card
  • A dumped ISO from a Wii game disc
  • Wii Backup Manager

Section I - Installation

  1. Extract Wii Backup Manager, and launch the program.
  2. Insert your USB drive or SD card into your computer.

Section II - Copying Games

  1. Go to the Drive 1 tab, then select the drive that will hold your backed up Wii games.

  2. Go to the Files tab, then select Add.
    • Select Files to add multiple games to the program, or select Folder to add a whole folder of games.

  3. Go to Select, then click Games not on drive 1.

  4. Select Transfer, then select Drive 1 to transfer the games over. The progress will be displayed on the right side of the window.

Using Wii Backup Fusion

Requirements

Section I - Installation

  1. Download Wiimm’s ISO tools for your OS and extract the .tar.gz into a folder that you can access with the terminal. The extracted folder should have these files inside:

  2. Open a terminal in the folder that you just extracted, and run sudo ./install.sh.
  3. Download Wii Backup Fusion for your OS and install. If on Linux, you will need to make the appimage executable by running chmod +x [FILE].

Section II - Copying Games

  1. Open Wii Backup Fusion and press Load.

  2. Select the directory where your game ISO is at.

  3. Right click on the game that you want to transfer to a drive, and press Transfer to image. Use the following settings:

  4. If there is not already a wbfs directory on your game drive, make one.

  5. Make another directory inside of the wbfs folder for the game backup. Take note of the Game ID in Wii Backup Fusion as you will need this for the game folder.

  6. Make a game folder for your game, formatted as game name [GAMEID]. For the game dumped as an example in this guide, it would be named New Super Mario Bros. Wii [SMNE01].

  7. Copy the game.wbfs file that was made in Step 3 to this new folder. The drive should be ready to use on a Wii.

Continue to cIOS
cIOS is needed for your Wii to use a USB Loader. Once this is done, you can use USB Loader GX or WiiFlow to play games from your USB drive or SD card.

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