Is there away to back up saves from my 360's HDD without getting a memory card? Thanks in advance.

you can back them up to a pc with 1 of 2 products from Datel

Datel Xport
http://base.teamxbox.com/blog-post/tag/SouthPaw/10/11-01-2006/p1/

Datel Xsata
http://gear.ign.com/articles/718/718315p1.html

both are/have been available at BB and CC

You'll have to buy something, you just have to choose a method.

Okay thanks I guess I'll buy a memory card then because all I really care about is my saves, I can always re-download my arcade games again.

I can save Xbox one game saves right?

isnt a memory card as much as the xport?

i'd much rather have the xport. but i guess you dont play sports games and dont care about roster updates, or downloading gamesaves from the net.

I would like to add to this question, backing up saves is not backing everything up correct? I mean achievements and things are saved in your live profile which you can recover If you change systems or one dies?

yea, achievements, live download rights, etc are all backed up on the server.

could one use the xport to download content to a external hard drive?

i guess you could technically put it on a hard drive after transferring it to a computer, but you wouldnt be able to access it from the xbox. it would purely be for backup.

it would be so easy for MS to allow us to use our MS Live accounts, which already have enough storage on their mail servers for save game files. have the option on the dash to save saves onto server. Done. But NOOOOOO, we lose our HD's, we are all screwed.

could one use the xport to download content to a external hard drive?
You could but it does you no good.
The 360 file system is encrypted so the files you copy out to the PC are useless until copied back to a 360 HDD.
All you can use the Datel products for is what they're advertised to do; create backups of your game data.

it would be so easy for MS to allow us to use our MS Live accounts, which already have enough storage on their mail servers for save game files. have the option on the dash to save saves onto server. Done. But NOOOOOO, we lose our HD's, we are all screwed.

You are right that it would make sense--and sell a lot of Cores--if you could store your saves, patches, and what-not online, even if it cost a few bucks a month to do so.

But, the funny thing is that when they offer pretty much that same capability--for Arcade games and TV shows--people insist they *want* the files on their HDD and they want a *big* HDD, at any cost, presumably because they don't trust MS to *really* let them download them over and over as they say you can.