WBFS, or Wii Backup File System, is a file system

File system

A file system is a means to organize data expected to be retained after a program terminates by providing procedures to store, retrieve and update data, as well as manage the available space on the device which contain it. A file system organizes data in an efficient manner and is tuned to the...

 developed by Wii homebrew coders kwiirk and Waninkoko. It uses Waninkoko's cIOS and works by creating a WBFS partition

Disk partitioning

Disk partitioning is the act of dividing a hard disk drive into multiple logical storage units referred to as partitions, to treat one physical disk drive as if it were multiple disks. Partitions are also termed "slices" for operating systems based on BSD, Solaris or GNU Hurd...

 on a SD

Secure Digital card

Secure Digital is a non-volatile memory card format developed by the SD Card Association for use in portable devices. The SD technology is used by more than 400 brands across dozens of product categories and more than 8,000 models, and is considered the de-facto industry standard.Secure Digital...

 or USB device. A Wii

Wii

The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...

 homebrew application may then be run to dump a Wii game to the partition. The titles may then be launched using a Wii USB loader, which uses cIOS and USB 2.0 to load games from an external device.

Although there is no way to natively load a WBFS partition in a Windows environment, there are several applications, such as WBFS manager, that allow the transfer of ISO image

ISO image

An ISO image is an archive file of an optical disc, composed of the data contents of every written sector of an optical disc, including the optical disc file system...

files to a WBFS formatted drive. The main advantage of this is the reduction in file size the WBFS format allows, as Wii discs are filled with padding data that must be present in the ISO but that the WBFS file system can strip away. This can allow some smaller games to go from a 4.7 GB (4.37 GiB) ISO file to less than a hundred megabytes as any unused space on the disk will be filled by this padding data.

External links

• WBFS Managers @ WikiTemp – A list of current WBFS managers for windows/Mac OS/Linux
• WBFS – The main development page for the WBFS file system
• Waninkoko's Blog – Blog of the creator of the USB loader and cIOS
• WBFS to ISO – A free WBFS tool to convert WBFS file to Wii game ISO file