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I am not very experienced with SD cards at all, and I have some pictures on my 3DS that I wanted to put on my laptop, but I was not sure if the games on my SD card would be deleted.

Will inserting an SD card with 3DS games into a camera or computer delete the games?

RapidashRocks524
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2 Answers2

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No it will not delete the games unless you tell your camera or laptop to format the SD card. So be very careful about what your computer is asking you to do when you plug the card in.

In a laptop it will show up as a storage device which you can access and copy the files from your SD card to your computer.

Sorean
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  • Eem some devices auto format your card. Not sure if it still happens but it certainly did some years ago. – rom016 Feb 10 '16 at 12:57
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Beware: while putting it in any device besides these with desktop OSes as some of them tend to silently format cards if they cannot read them for some reason (be it wrong filesystem or anything else)

As long as you use a reader directly connected to Windows device it will be fine (or Windows will ask if you want to format if anything bad happens), but cameras, phones etc are risky; consult a detailed manual to be sure (but unfortunately details like this may be omitted anyway).

Ben
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zakius
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    I'll pretty much like a source or reference on your claim of silent format. As far as I know, no device will ever format a SD card without user input. I found this answer very misleading – Jonathan Drapeau Nov 03 '15 at 13:16
  • @JonathanDrapeau unfortunately it happened to me once while I was using my phone as card reader, but I'm not sure which one was it, probably ancient samsung L760 but I can be wrong here, cannot remember all my devices – zakius Nov 03 '15 at 13:44
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    Unless you can provide a source, you could also have forgotten that you clicked, pushed or touched on your phone to format the card thinking you were asked if the phone could read the SD card, which would end up as not a silent format at all. A device that would silent format a card would have left customers with a bitter taste and wouldn't have last long on the shelves. – Jonathan Drapeau Nov 03 '15 at 13:52
  • I have had cellphones silently add their own directories to an SD card, but they've never formatted it. – gla3dr Nov 03 '15 at 15:36
  • @JonathanDrapeau you may believe me or not, but the point is: don't trust devices you are not sure how they will behave. only that and as much as that, I'm pretty cautious since windows installer decided it will be fun to silently delete my second partition and use free space as bigger recovery partition during upgrade to win10, it absolutely shouldn't do this, but it did and I was unable to recover anything, so you can never be too sure and too protected, backup as much as you can – zakius Nov 04 '15 at 14:43
  • I can't believe you as what you say can not happen without user consent, even more about your lost of partition. – Jonathan Drapeau Nov 04 '15 at 16:20
  • @JonathanDrapeau I'd be glad if it was not true, unfortunately upgrader decided that having 100MiB recovery partition is a shame so it decided to create 300MiB one, and it did it after standard "nothing should happen, we don't want to break anything, but just in case do your backup", and yeah, next time I'll see warning like this I will do the backup, even if it means hours days of uploading due to lack of local storage – zakius Nov 04 '15 at 16:39
  • A friend of the family's camera auto formatted her sd card. This was years ago though and hopefully manufacturers avoid this now. Either way its best not to risk something of value when you could back it up on your computer. – rom016 Feb 10 '16 at 13:04