Hey everyone, I want to bring attention to this weird case of save data corruption that just happened to my mother, and maybe also ask for help on how to get it back.
So, basically, my mother played ACNH yesterday like normal, and next time she booted up the game, it was as if she was to start over, she was greeted by Timmy and Tommy, with character designing prompts and all. She said the last thing that she remembered doing was being in the art section of the museum, and then saving and turning the game off afterwards. She said she only noticed how the saving process at that time took very long, like a minute. So when she wanted to play again some hours later, some sort of error came up in the Home Menu, she doesn't remember what, but it did ask her to redownload some missing necessary update data, or something along those lines. So, of course I was checking her Switch. In the system data, it says that there is an existing save file for Animal Crossing New Horizons, the size is 222 MB, so why doesn't the game access it? We restarted the game many times, and even swapped the cartridge with mine (we both use cartridge versions). We completely turned off the switch, so full reset, and we also did the "Check for corrupted data" option, but it said there was no corrupted data found. I went on to download the island transfer software. When trying to transfer her savegame over to mine, it simply said "There is no Animal Crossing New Horizons save data on this console" - which is wrong. It was clearly there, but corrupt or inacessible for the game. Of course I also did the option where you would restore your cloud data, by holding the minus data at the launch, but then Tom Nook said, there is no data that can be restored found on the servers. This is also very strange. It should be there! I will contact Nintendo about this tomorrow, when they open. It's just so damn sad to see, she had a WONDERFUL 5* island, with I believe over 300 hours in the game. If there's no way to restore it, it's just so devastating to see it happen just like that. It also makes me now hesitate to continue playing myself, it's scary see the save file just vanish due to an error like it did for her, and then the cloud backup option failing too. I don't know if this is a bug and reproducable, but I want to bring attention to this, maybe it also happened to someone else. I just wish she could get her island back, but I am afraid she lost all of her progress. How can Nintendo let this happen? I will see what Nintendo says tomorrow, but if anyone has some things I could try out still, please tell me.
So, basically, my mother played ACNH yesterday like normal, and next time she booted up the game, it was as if she was to start over, she was greeted by Timmy and Tommy, with character designing prompts and all. She said the last thing that she remembered doing was being in the art section of the museum, and then saving and turning the game off afterwards. She said she only noticed how the saving process at that time took very long, like a minute. So when she wanted to play again some hours later, some sort of error came up in the Home Menu, she doesn't remember what, but it did ask her to redownload some missing necessary update data, or something along those lines. So, of course I was checking her Switch. In the system data, it says that there is an existing save file for Animal Crossing New Horizons, the size is 222 MB, so why doesn't the game access it? We restarted the game many times, and even swapped the cartridge with mine (we both use cartridge versions). We completely turned off the switch, so full reset, and we also did the "Check for corrupted data" option, but it said there was no corrupted data found. I went on to download the island transfer software. When trying to transfer her savegame over to mine, it simply said "There is no Animal Crossing New Horizons save data on this console" - which is wrong. It was clearly there, but corrupt or inacessible for the game. Of course I also did the option where you would restore your cloud data, by holding the minus data at the launch, but then Tom Nook said, there is no data that can be restored found on the servers. This is also very strange. It should be there! I will contact Nintendo about this tomorrow, when they open. It's just so damn sad to see, she had a WONDERFUL 5* island, with I believe over 300 hours in the game. If there's no way to restore it, it's just so devastating to see it happen just like that. It also makes me now hesitate to continue playing myself, it's scary see the save file just vanish due to an error like it did for her, and then the cloud backup option failing too. I don't know if this is a bug and reproducable, but I want to bring attention to this, maybe it also happened to someone else. I just wish she could get her island back, but I am afraid she lost all of her progress. How can Nintendo let this happen? I will see what Nintendo says tomorrow, but if anyone has some things I could try out still, please tell me.
