How do you backup your downloaded ROMs? (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by hellisfulloftacos@lemmy.one to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I use emulators that play directly from (.iso) or (.img) files, however as you probably know, most ROMs are downloaded as archives.

Do you backup your ROMs in their downloaded archived format? Or as uncompressed files?

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[-] Whooping_Seal@sh.itjust.works 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Whatever file format I use them in is also how I back them up, I backup my entire desktop's and laptop's data to an external hard drive and an online service provider. I'm sure a compressed format would be more space efficient but that would take much more time given my use case.

In the case of my laptop it runs Linux and the filesystem I use supports "transparent compression" (almost all contents of the drive are compressed with zstd), so I'm guessing any of the ROMs on there will have already been compressed as nuch as they can (but I'm not knowledgeable enough on the file format specs)

[-] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 month ago

Your backup is probably already compressed. Why do both, have the risk of corruption and being un-unpackable, work of doing it vs just hsving ine backup and be done.
Only upside would maybe be local space storage