How do I backup a PS4 to an external hard drive and get around error 'CE-31414-3'?

Solution 1:

I had the same CE-31414-3 error after formatting to FAT32 from the Mac. This ended up producing 2 'partitions" on the drive. The first being very small and the second the full 1TB. In the end I formatted the disk from the PS4 which produced only 1 'partition" and that seemed to work.

Solution 2:

I had the problem of not completely backing up, three times it failed, then I read an answer on another forum.

From memory, go to devices/USB devices and when it shows your USB hard drive press options on the controller. You have the option to exfat your hard drive, it worked fine for me.

Solution 3:

Without knowing anything about the external hard drive you are using, this sounds like a formatting problem to me. According to playstation.com, it says that external hard drives must be formatted in FAT32 or exFAT. Most external hard drives are formatted in NTFS. You will probably have to plug your external hard drive into your PC and format it first. (Doing so will erase any data that is currently on the hard drive, so make a copy of that somewhere first, if it is anything that you need to keep.) You can find a guide to do this online, if you are not familiar with the process.

Solution 4:

New solution: CE-31414-3: Unplug and replug the drive when PS4 reboots.

I ran into similar issues with backing up my PS4. I confirmed that I had a single exFAT 0.5TB partition on an MBR partition table (created on a Mac using disk utility after enabling 'show volumes'). The PS4 would prepare the backup but after reboot it would quickly fail with error CE-31414-3.

My suspicion was that the problem is actually the power down cycle reboot sequence: I believe the PS4 powers down and powers up the portable USB SSD too quickly for the SSD to properly reboot. So I manually unplugged it from the PS4 for an extra second after I saw the second write to disk finish. This allowed PS4 to find the disk and the backup has now started.

I had also tried 'rebuilding the database' in safe mode and setting the description to a single letter and setting the partition name to a 4 letters - but these did not help.All off these are likely unnecessary if it actually is the short-duration power cycling problem.