The original Nintendo Switch automatically downloads all new articles to the system when you’re connected to the internet. Since 2023, I noticed that the Nintendo Switch only has a limited capacity of articles it can store offline on the console. After you exceed the limit, it begins to delete the articles one-by-one in order of oldest to newest. Some exceptions are that it does not delete articles that you explicitly bookmarked, nor the introductory articles that appear the first time you ever start the console.

Upon discovering this, I immediately realised how terrible this is for the preservation of Switch News Articles. It meant that by 2023, almost all pre-2020s news articles were permanently lost forever on the vast majority of console that are out there in the wild - because most people, even if they’ve never touched the News app on their console, have accumulated thousands of articles over time, thus causing the system to delete everything that is old.

At the time, I hoped that maybe someone had created a homebrew app for modded Switch’s, that maybe rips the articles sort of like ripping games, so that you can store a backup of them. I thought this was incredibly unlikely though. I didn’t have time to look into it at the time, so, because I now knew that more and more articles were being permanently wiped from my console, literally EVERY SINGLE DAY, I just got out my capture card, and began recording videos of me scrolling through each and every single article. My hope was that I could save everything on my console, and think about the homebrew thing later.

Well, that was three years ago, and I’ve still been recording every single article on my Switch since then. I’ve accumulated hundreds, possibly thousands of video file recordings of Nintendo Switch news articles. The only pre-2020s stuff I managed to archive were the few articles that I actually bookmarked back in the day. Otherwise, nothing earlier then June 2022 existed on my console anymore. My intention is to upload all these videos to The Internet Archive and Odysee (permaweb) when I get time to do so.

Since I’m in Australia using an AU console, I don’t get every single article on my console. There’s probably a bunch of country-exclusive articles I haven’t recorded that could only be received on U.S. consoles, U.K. consoles, and more countries. I do mostly get articles that are released in most English speaking countries including America, but there are also a ton of region-specific articles I get too. Australia and New Zealand are grouped as the same region, so I get articles for both countries.

So, I’ve tried to look into whether a homebrew app of some sort exists that can be used to actually properly archive these articles… not just a video recording archive like mine, but a backup of an actual article file that can be loaded onto any console. I don’t have any programming skills or console-hacking skills or a modded Switch, so unfortunately I can’t just simply take the initiative to create something like this for myself. If I had the skills and knowledge, I would probably give it a try, but I just don’t unfortunately.

So, does anyone actually know if there is any better way of archiving these news articles on a modded Switch?