I’m trying to find a way to save some Xbox 360 achievements that I’ve earned while my console was offline. Typically, just connecting to Xbox Live will sync up your gamertag and the offline achievements will be added to you profile. This works because, usually, the gamertag is associated with a single Xbox 360, which goes offline and then back online. My situation is different, and it seems like I’m going to lose my offline achievements.
The set up
I have a single gold account and two Xbox 360 consoles. One of these consoles is always online and is used exclusively for watching Netflix (because the drive tray is broken). The other console works fine for games, but is physically located where wired Ethernet isn’t available, and I haven’t purchased a wireless adapter. In order to get the same gamertag on both consoles, I used the recover gamertag feature to bring it down to the online console. This means that the Netflix gamertag is regularly connecting to Xbox Live while my gaming is done on the same gamertag, but offline.
Microsoft doesn’t seem to want to support this sort of arrangement, as it appears that gamertags are associated with individual Xbox consoles and that only the last-to-be-connected gamertag is seen as legit.
The problems
The first problem I’m facing is how to get all of these achievements that were earned offline sync’d up with my Live profile. One might reasonably think that simply connecting the offline Xbox to Xbox Live and logging in would do this, but Live sees the account as invalid (presumably because the account associated with the other box has connected more recently). Upon connecting to Xbox Live, I’m prompted to recover my gamertag, which I know from experience will erase my offline achievements (I’ll get the gamertag as it exists on the online console – which will also render the gamertag on the online console invalid).
I also tried to use a USB flash drive to move my gamer profile from the offline box to the online box. The move itself was successful, but when I tried to connect to Live, it again found the account to be invalid and invited me to recover my gamertag. I was able to move the gamer profile back to the USB drive, remove the drive, and then recover the online gamertag in order to keep using Netflix, but I was back to square one.
I haven’t yet tried moving the offline console’s hard drive with the gamertag to the online console. As of right now, this is the only thing I can think to try.
The second problem I’m facing is that the offline Xbox doesn’t yet have the new dashboard and some of my games have updates available that are supposed to fix some bugs. I’ve read that it should be possible to get these updates by creating a silver account and logging into Xbox Live under that account. That would be somewhat helpful, but unnecessary if I can solve the first problem.
I am in a similar situation. My account was compromised, which caused Microsoft to initiate their standard “investigation process.” Part of which is completely locking me out of my account. They finished the investigation and restored my account to me. They also removed all consoles that were registered on my gamertag, so the hacker wouldn’t be able to sign back in. The investigation took a while, of course, so in the meantime I had been playing offline. Now I need to download my profile since permissions have all been removed….once I do, I will lose all my offline achievements. Microsoft has told me there is no way around it, but I have the number for an actual person, not just their 800 number, so I’m going to try working with him. He has helped in the past, hopefully, we can work this out too.
Officially though, there is no way to do what you want to do 🙁
Jack,
Thanks for the comment. Please do let me know if you or your Microsoft contact come up with any way around this predicament.
It’s very likely that their version of your profile will always win in a conflict, so I’m slowly getting used to the idea of losing my offline achievements.
My situation is similar, but, my gamertag is shared between my xbox360 and my windows phone 8. I have earned over 1000 gamerscore on the phone alone, while being online and is greater then that on the console. I had accidently earned an achievement tonight on the console, while the console was offline, and I do not have internet access at my home, and haven’t had it for nearly 6 months. The achievements earned online, on the phone, are not on the console. Same thing with the one achievement earned tonight on the console, it is not on the phone.
My question is this, when I re sync my console online, will this corrupt my account, or will it just re sync what is already online and I lose the offline earned achievement? If it helps, my gamerscore on the console is 72096. Minus the 40gs achevo earned tonight, 72056. My gs online, on my phone is 73136. The gs of 72056 was my gs when I was last online on the console.
Any help or info would be great. Thank you.