I don’t give much credit to Nintendo for a lot of things outside of making entertaining games. Frankly they’re terrible about keeping up with the modern state of gaming, by in large, and they’re especially bad at dealing with networking and the Internet. So it seems weird that I’m about to write about Nintendo doing something, arguably, right on just such a subject.

Many a games journalism website has seen fit to highlight the New 3DS’s microSD card slot and the fact that it’s kind of oddly locked away under a bottom cover that requires a tool to get in to. Knowing only this as I’m sure many people will might lead one to believe that this is just Nintendo up to their old tricks. And at first glance you’d be right. If you have a need to physically swap sd cards then perhaps you’re out of luck.

Fortunately if you’re just looking to make a backup Nintendo got smart and tucked away a little trick that makes that microSD card accessible through a network share on your home network.

Under “Data Management” you will find an option for “microSD Management”. This wizard will walk you through creating a network name for your 3DS and a username and password and then connect you to your homes wifi network so you can access the storage on the card.

On your windows PC open a file explorer window and in the quick access icons in the left window pane scroll down to network and click the icon. You should see the name of your 3DS listed. Click on that to access it. If for some reason you don’t see your 3DS listed click on any blank space in the address bar on the file explorer window and type \\MY3DSNAME where MY3DSNAME is the name you picked for your 3DS. This should find and open your 3DS files for you.

Enjoy this tiny slice of Nintendo finally getting with the new(I use the word loosely) networked world. There isn’t much of it to be had.