You should probably plug in your Switch and 3DS games every 5 to 10 years to keep them from breaking, preservation activists say

For those of you who have taken to physical media over digital for preservation reasons, you may want to pop those cartridges into your console every now and then.

According to DoesItPlay on Twitter, a community dedicated to video games preservation, you should "probably plug in your card-based games every 5-10 years", as spotted by Time Extension.

DoesItPlay's guidance is based on information from user socram8888 on the GBAtemp forums, who posted the results of their research into the technology used by Nintendo in its 3DS and Switch cartridges back in 2021. Their findings have two main points.

The first is that 3DS and Switch cartridges use a technology called XtraROM, which isn't a read-only flash memory. If it was read-only memory, the data on them would inevitably be lost over time as electrons leak out, with no way to restore it.

The second is that Switch and 3DS cartridges contain commands to "self-refresh", which means they are "capable of reprogramming" to fix any data errors. According to socram8888, the 3DS runs this command "every 10k sectors read (from card_CardAsyncController.cpp), or every three milliseconds (from card_CardConfig.cpp), whichever happens first." Therefore they concluded that it's best to pop those cartridges in every so often and "let them idle for a while" to keep the data on them refreshed.

DoesItPlay adds this is best practice for all card-based games, so you may want to dig out your old PS Vita collection too. This probably won't make any difference to those game-key cards for Switch 2, which developers have called "disheartening" for preservation efforts.

More interested in the latest releases? Check out our list of upcoming Switch 2 games for 2025 and beyond.