Two Ways to Backup PS3/4 Hard Drive Step by Step

Before you backup PS3 or PS4 hard drive

Backing up your PS3 hard drive is the best way to prevent losing your PS3 games, and it is very helpful if you want to upgrade your hard drive of PS3. PS3 has it backup tool that will not take much time or space, but it might get you out of trouble in the future. You can use an AC powered external hard drive or a flash drive as the backup drive. 

The backup drive for PS3 has to be formatted with FAT32. You can use Disk Management or DiskPart.exe in Windows or Disk Utility in Mac OS to format your backup drive to FAT32. If the backup drive you choose has more than 32GB capacity, you need to use third party partition software to format it to FAT32, such as AOMEI Partition Assistant, which can also help you convert NTFS to FAT32 without data loss.

How to backup PS3/4 hard drive?

After you prepare a removable drive formatted with FAT32, then you can connect it to your PS3 to get started:

1. Navigate to Settings > System Settings > Backup Utility>Back Up.

2. Choose “Yes” to confirm.

3. In the next screen, you can see your removable drive. If you want to backup PS3 to USB drive, you need an appropriate USB adaptor with some models of the PS3™ system, otherwise, it will you will get a "no disks detected" error message. Then select the drive and press “X” to continue.

4. Then the backup is in process. When it completes you will get a message saying that “Back up completed”.

If you cannot spare an external hard drive to be formatted with FAT32, then you can backup PS3 hard drive to your computer hard drive with free backup software.

Backup PS3 games hard drive in Windows

If you want to upgrade your PS3 hard drive with another HDD or backup PS3 hard drive more flexibly, you can remove the hard drive from PS3 and connect it to your Windows PC. Therefore, you need an S-ATA cable and an S-ATA power cable. 

If you do not want to open up your computer to connect the PS3 hard drive, you can also find an S-ATA to USB adapter to connect the PS3 HDD externally. Be aware that removing your PS3 hard drive might void the PS3 warranty. In order to be able to restore the disk backup to another hard drive flawlessly, you can use a free backup and restore program AOMEI Backupper Standard.

1. Download and run this freeware.

2. At the Home screen, click “Backup”, and select “Disk Backup” in the next screen.

3. Select the PS3 hard drive as the source disk to be backed up.

4. Select a folder on your computer hard drive to save the image backup.

5. Click “Start Backup” to run the backup.

After the backup finishes, you can easily restore the backup to another hard drive or SSD if you want to upgrade your PS3 HDD. Besides backup PS3 hard drive, AOMEI Backupper also allows you to clone hard drive in order to protect your data.