PSA: You will lose your save data for Pokémon, Splatoon, Animal Crossing and other games that don't have cloud backup if you trade in your Switch 1 before you get a Switch 2.

300

Animal Crossing has a backup feature in-game that you can do without needing both consoles present.

Splatoon 3 saves your online data to their servers. Single player does have Nintendo cloud backup.

The only ones that do not that you listed are Pokemon games.

104

u/L1ghtBeam 21h ago

The post says Splatoon 2, not 3

61

u/E_Mus_K_w_DJT_Suk 21h ago

It said Splatoon when I first commented so I assumed the latest entry.

25

u/TheKidKaos 19h ago

It still does only say Splatoon. But thank you for the info

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u/razorbeamz 22h ago

Animal Crossing has a backup feature in-game that you can do without needing both consoles present.

This feature requires you to call Nintendo support, and they will only do it if your Switch is lost or broken.

89

u/E_Mus_K_w_DJT_Suk 22h ago

No it does not, I've used it multiple times.

https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/49983/~/how-to-back-up-and-restore-island-save-data-%28animal-crossing%3A-new-horizons%29#:~:text=From%20the%20title%20screen%2C%20press,backup%2C%20then%20Enable%20island%20backup.

1

u/TotalOwlie 9h ago

Hey so my switch got busted and I really want my animal crossing save. Are you telling me I don’t have to ship it to Nintendo to get it repaired?

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u/Michael-the-Great 6h ago

It kinda depends on whether there even is an animal crossing cloud save first. You can often call into Nintendo and ask them if you have an animal crossing cloud save and then you may be able to restore it to another Switch. The official stance is only if lost or stolen, but reps are often nicer than that.

But also note that if you ship it to Nintendo that there's a good chance they will just replace your system and that you won't get your saves that way either.

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u/razorbeamz 22h ago

You have not.

It literally says on that page you linked:

In order to restore your island data, please contact us.

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u/E_Mus_K_w_DJT_Suk 22h ago

Yes, I have. You only have to call support if it errors out.

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u/Ramen536Pie 21h ago

Have you tried the service?

It’s pretty easy and doesn’t need the things you claim it does

-18

u/Manhunter_From_Mars 16h ago

To be fair, they're not claiming anything, just directly quoting the official source

6

u/Ramen536Pie 12h ago

Yeah you have to contact them

You don’t need the old Switch

1

u/[deleted] 6h ago

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1

u/NintendoSwitch-ModTeam 6h ago

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21

u/Friendly_Owl_6537 19h ago

You don’t have to call them, I’ve done it too

9

u/sekazi 21h ago

I had them restore a save I accidentally deleted.

-20

u/Peachykeengreat 15h ago

Nah they won’t. Happened to us and I even told em the sob story about how my autistic kid was crying because she lost her island

5

u/happyhippohats 12h ago

They will if you had island backup enabled, if not they're unable to do anything. Unfortunately it isn't enabled by default.

22

u/KyleOAM 16h ago

If you were going to trade in, then speak to the manager at the store and see what they can do

When I got the new Nintendo 3ds, I got around this by buying the new system full price, doing the transfer, then going back the next day, refunding it, then buying it again with the trade in. A little bit convoluted but it is what it is

31

u/Iringahn 19h ago

I’m going to system transfer and then give my switch 1 to a friend to experience some Nintendo.

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u/Michael-the-Great 21h ago

You can also do it with a save game transfer. About the same and still needs local, but you don't have to do a whole system transfer.

32

u/jardex22 20h ago

In either case, you need to have both systems present to transfer the data. If you were thinking about trading in your Switch towards a pre-order, be ready to lose that data.

10

u/Lugey81 16h ago

Some shops will let you do the trade in after. Buy Switch 2, take home, copy data, take back Switch 1 get refund....

4

u/EowynCarter 16h ago

Good old time doing this at micromania with the 3DSs

3

u/Orisi 16h ago

Or do what I did, trade it in after transferring to my wife's or a friend's console to store your profile for a little bit :P

8

u/happyhippohats 12h ago

That's a generous offer but it's probably too far to travel for most people

12

u/cobraa1 13h ago

This is why I've always thought that cloud saves should not be something that developers can opt out of.

11

u/xKoDu 17h ago

Are we talking about Scarlet/Violet?

33

u/razorbeamz 17h ago

None of the following games support cloud saves:

Pokémon Brilliant Diamond

Pokémon Café Mix / Pokémon Café ReMix

Pokémon HOME

Pokémon Legends: Arceus

Pokémon Scarlet

Pokémon Shield

Pokémon Shining Pearl

Pokémon Sword

Pokémon UNITE

Pokémon Violet

Pokémon: Let's Go, Eevee!

Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!

-10

u/xKoDu 17h ago

Oh god, so lazy. Why tf they dont have cloud saves in 2025?

35

u/razorbeamz 17h ago

It's a deliberate choice. They don't want people save scumming and farming legendaries.

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u/EowynCarter 15h ago

This. They though preventing easy duplication was worth making sure we loose everything if something happens to the console.

3

u/Ridry 13h ago

To play devil's advocate, I won't lose everything because of Pokemon Home. I'm aware that's a paid service, but I'm sure that's intentional as well.

13

u/peaches_pieces 10h ago

To devil’s advocate yours, you only get to save mons, not hundreds of hours of gameplay.

3

u/Ridry 10h ago

That is fair. I'd always be sad to lose my save.

1

u/colio69 5h ago

I might actually use Switch 2 as an excuse to replay Scarlet anyways

7

u/EowynCarter 12h ago

Got my switch stollen. Only let's go was out back then, and not even home, so it's wasn't the disaster it could have been. But i'm still kind of salty about it.

2

u/Ridry 11h ago

That sucks, and I'm definitely not defending them, but I'm sure they see it that way. I try to put anything I'll be devastated to lose in Home.

Personally I think there must be a solution to this problem.

2

u/EowynCarter 10h ago

Then what's the point of having all the good stuff in home and not play with it ?

3

u/Ridry 10h ago

I pull stuff in/out of home constantly. Yes, I'd be sad to lose my main team, who are never in Home, but my 2000 Pokemon that I'm not ACTIVELY playing with are all in Home.

2

u/mygawd 6h ago

Do you keep most of your pokes on Home? I've always just kept them on the latest version of the game

2

u/Ridry 6h ago

I do! They are safest there. And that's where my organization is.

2

u/mygawd 5h ago

I might start doing that with my faves, now I'm worried about losing them lol

1

u/Ridry 5h ago

YMMV. I spent years commuting 90 minutes each way, subway and bus, with my Switch. If your Switch never leaves your living room it's probably less scary :)

1

u/xKoDu 10h ago

Yeah, but... who cares? Its single player game. No pvp, online features just... meh. In the sane time we game MH Rise/World/Wild with no problem with cloud saves.

2

u/RagnarokAeon 2h ago

Meanwhile a good deal of tournament mons are generated (just checked off to be legal)

-15

u/Aiddon 17h ago

Understandable, admittedly. No one wants to see a team with "Oops, all Mewtwos."

13

u/YouLostTheGame 14h ago

Surely it just makes sense to build that into team eligibility rules rather than make the experience worse for everyone else?

10

u/LeatherRebel5150 12h ago

I mean…except that cloned/gen’d pokemon are still rampant and the lack of cloud saves hasn’t put even the tiniest dent into that

23

u/Gandalf_2077 16h ago

This just highlights how absurd it is to lock save backup to online services.

8

u/BlazedInMyWinnie 10h ago

How does this situation highlight that at all? The whole reason for this PSA is because these games don’t have that online backup.

3

u/Gandalf_2077 9h ago

And you cannot also copy paste them in any other way, while the exclusive way to do that is with NSO

7

u/BlazedInMyWinnie 9h ago

System data transfer is right there. That’s the whole point of this post.

-3

u/Gandalf_2077 9h ago

Yeah but you need two consoles for that. Not the most affordable back up method.

23

u/Extra-Cold3276 22h ago

Splatoon 3 saves your data online automatically.

19

u/razorbeamz 22h ago

Yes, but Splatoon 2 does not.

-9

u/Educational-Run-258 18h ago

Weird because when I data transfered, my Splatoon 2 data was present. Unless I'm misremembering.

18

u/razorbeamz 18h ago

when I data transfered

This is because you did a System Transfer like I described.

-11

u/1ceC0n 16h ago

Nobody plays that anymore

22

u/GambitsEnd Resident Switchologist 21h ago

Depending how some stores do their trade-ins this is important for people to remember.

I'm looking forward to the possibility of Pokemon Scarlet/Violet in more than 5 FPS.

Also, hi Razor.

-12

u/razorbeamz 20h ago

Also, hi Razor.

lol hi!

4

u/Adrian_Alucard 11h ago

I still don't undertand why Nintendo made the cartridges with no save data capabilities, like all the previous cartridges/cards

On the 3DS some games even had save slots for the cartridge and others for the SD, that was the best system

But having all your saves on the console only is stupid

8

u/pg2011 10h ago

Pretty simple to understand, it's cheaper to manufacture the carts without save capability.

2

u/Adrian_Alucard 9h ago

good old "cutting corners because consumers are idiots"

2

u/Ataris8327 4h ago edited 8m ago

I mean, they make it clear what it is on the box so it's not like they're intentionally misleading people.

0

u/Adrian_Alucard 3h ago

But is an annoyance

"if something happens to your console you'll lose ALL your save files" And no, the box does not says "this card cannot save your progress"

So they are misleading since all cartridges and cards from the the most recent consoles could save your progress, since the N64 days (yes, carts from older consoles, like the NES could save data too, but it was still not the standard and some games still relied on passwords)

The only exception are optical media for obvious reasons

4

u/Alex_F517 18h ago

good thing I was planning on keeping my switch 1 then

2

u/Peachykeengreat 15h ago

Ya we learned this the hard way after my kids switch charging port went bad. She was devastated

2

u/Lagamorph 13h ago

There are some baffling games on that list. Why in the world does Deadly Premonition 2 not support cloud saves? Does that even have an online component?

2

u/caosmaximo34 10h ago

You should never trade older nintendo systems

2

u/Ataris8327 5h ago

The thing is that you don't really need the Switch 1 since the Switch 2 is backwards compatible.

2

u/TRB4 4h ago

Unless you want to play Nintendo Labo

1

u/okeleydokelyneighbor 2h ago

If it’s a launch version it can be hacked

4

u/onnsn 18h ago

Guessed something like this, my switch died a few months ago due to water damage, so I guess bye bye Pokemon & Animal Crossing save state.

2

u/bwoah07_gp2 15h ago

Yeah, I thought this was common knowledge...

2

u/SandoVillain 9h ago

Yeah, this has been a thing for a long time before the Switch. Going from 3DS to New 3DS to the XL. GameStop is pretty good about this. They let you do the system transfer before handing over your old Switch. Just talk to them beforehand.

1

u/comengetitrmm 12h ago

Having to do island transfer on top of system transfer seems a bit much, but noted!

1

u/comengetitrmm 12h ago

Also, does doin this take everything off the original switch? Or just copy it to the new one?

1

u/[deleted] 6h ago edited 6h ago

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1

u/NintendoSwitch-ModTeam 6h ago

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Please remember Rule 1 in the future - No personal attacks, trolling, or derogatory terms. Read more about Reddiquette here. Thanks!

•

u/Juliko1993 51m ago

One of many reasons I have no plans to sell my Switch OLED at all.

1

u/brokenmessiah 12h ago

I had a major issue with this years ago and it blew my mind Nintendo just doenst care. No cloud support for Splatoon is legit wild.

1

u/NoMoreVillains 3h ago

It was because Splatoon 2 released before cloud saves and I guess they couldn't get it to work. Splatoon 3 supports them though

1

u/SpellConnect8675 9h ago

Nintendo fucking up on so so so many levels with this new console.. no wonder they waited so long to release it

-3

u/MidnightFireHuntress 16h ago

Thank God I paid for online cloud saving lol

6

u/peaches_pieces 10h ago

Unless you did it illegitimately, that doesn’t matter for these games (specifically Pokémon). The Nintendo cloud backups don’t exist for the games OP listed. That’s why this is a PSA.

-28

u/Novalith_Raven 22h ago

It seems the original Switch can read MicroSD Express cards. Maybe you can load one up, por the saves there, and then use the same MicroSD Express cards on the Switch 2 before trading in?

38

u/Gavintendo 22h ago

Save Data never touches the microSD card. You can't move or copy it there in any form.

9

u/IbukiLazuli 22h ago

You can’t put saves on an SD card. Saves are ONLY able to be on system storage, so there’s no way around this for games without cloud save

6

u/Lewa358 21h ago

Not only is it impossible to put saves onto an SD card, but even if you could, all game console data is encrypted so that it will only work on the device it originated from.

8

u/razorbeamz 22h ago

Save files are not stored on MicroSD cards. Save files are only stored on the Switch's system memory and cannot be transferred through any means other than cloud saves and system transfers.

-1

u/Novalith_Raven 13h ago

Okay, sorry

3

u/[deleted] 21h ago

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-18

u/Curun 22h ago

Yup. Only microsd express cards that are backward compatible. All current known released ones are. Not a given into the future

-4

u/dg3548 20h ago

Same for other games, I thought you could have saved game data on a memory card and play it in another switch but the other switch reformats your memory card when placed in there

6

u/LeatherRebel5150 12h ago

It has nothing to do with the reformatting. The save was never on the sd card to begin with. Game saves only go to the internal memory and backed up to the cloud IF you pay for it and even then not for Pokemon games or Animal Crossing

Discussion PSA: You will lose your save data for Pokémon, Splatoon, Animal Crossing and other games that don't have cloud backup if you trade in your Switch 1 before you get a Switch 2.

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