XBLA in the long term

[Frizz.Meister]

Recently lots of great games have been released on xbox live arcade. However with them being digital media and the xbox hard drives being reletivly susceptable to damage, i was wondering how do you keep them for the long term, ie years.

Is there any way to save these games onto disc or flash drive or any other storage device, as im on my 3rd hard drive now and have little faith in them.

[yomomma1]

Who what failing? Hard drives are practically the only thing that doesn't explode on the 360.



Are reliable...



Are also very reliable. Seriously if you don't want your hard drive failing use one like that.

[Frizz.Meister]

With 3 seperate hard drives, after around 9-10months i get a message on my dashboard saying, Hard Disk Corrupted and it wont react to any input untill i restart it without the hardrive.

I looked at your links and whilst flash drives may be reliable i am yet to find a way to save arcade games onto one. If you know a way, im all ears.

[yomomma1]

http://redvsblue.com/viewEntry.php?id=2025

http://majornelson.com/archive/2010/03/ ... l-6th.aspx

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/hardware/accessories/storage/

If you are connected to xbox live, and I am assuming you are, They updated it so you can use usb storage devices for storage for the 360. Simply go to memory, and configure the device.

[Niode]

With 3 seperate hard drives, after around 9-10months i get a message on my dashboard saying, Hard Disk Corrupted and it wont react to any input untill i restart it without the hardrive.

I looked at your links and whilst flash drives may be reliable i am yet to find a way to save arcade games onto one. If you know a way, im all ears.

I have never experienced this. Had a 360 since launch in this country... I've never even heard of other people with the same problem. Try not to turn it off at the button on the front. Always turn it off by holding guide and then choose turn off system. This gives the system a chance to stop any writes to the drive. If you are just turning it off without 'shutting it down' then you are risking any writes in progress getting corrupted. Same reason flash memory gets corrupted when you just pull it out of the USB instead of ejecting before hand.

[avrame]

Yep, I agree with Niode 100%. Hardware shutdowns (via physical puttons) should only be used if the computer is refusing to shutdown through software means. Remember the good old NES days where they would tell you to 'Hold RESET before turning off the power'? Thats still an issue to this day.

I think the worst scenario I encountered was I removed my USB drive after saving my homework to my USB drive from my computer. Apparently, Norton decided to scan my thumbdrive after the copy, and the file was trashed when I tried to pull it up in class. I always use software shutdowns now, not hard to do, and well worth the 3 seconds it takes.

Oh yeah, don't use Norton

[CRTGAMER]

A couple links for backing up the 360 hard drive.
http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/10678/Dat ... -Solution/
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-con ... o-your-pc/

[Frizz.Meister]

Your most likely right about the shutdown method being the cause of my problems as i always shut the console down by just hitting the front button.

As for the update, yes i am connected to live but never realised this feature was included in the recent update. Thanks alot for telling me as id feared it would be a long complex progress.

[RadarScope1]

By and large the HDDs are really reliable.

There's a bigger issue here. The real question is not whether you can save the games to keep forever, but whether or not the games will still be available for download and supported in the future.

That's a value judgment for each consumer to make. I think they will. Going forward, Microsoft's true asset will be Xbox Live, the service, not Xboxes. Only a very few XBLA games have been de-listed (mostly Midway games because of licensing issues, some free adver-games and then two or three other real stinkers). I feel like as long as I own a MS console, I'll be able to play (or re-download) my XBLA games.

[the7k]

I used to worry about games on digital services, but in all honest, I feel its no big deal. Everything gets cracked eventually, and even after XBLA is put to rest, we'll be able to get them thanks to the internet.

I mean, hell, even Satellaview games are easy enough to get a hold of, for the most part.