Pokemon gamer lost '20 years of data' in Switch 2 system transfer - here's how to avoid this

If you're switching your Switch - by which we mean migrating from the Nintendo Switch to the Switch 2 - and you're a Pokémon player, there's a potentially huge disaster awaiting your saved data. And it's one that's easily avoided (though it will cost you a little bit of money to do so).

IGN picked up on the story of ThatOtaku26 on Reddit (in a now removed post) where they explain that they were changing over to the Switch 2 when they lost their Scarlet save (with their most treasured creatures).

That save held over two decades of said Pokémon and 1,000 hours of gameplay, so as you can imagine, that came as a bit of a blow to say the least.

ThatOtaku26 wrote:

"My Scarlet save file is gone. It loads straight into the language selection and create a character screens. No data on my OLED. Just all gone."

They continued (excuse the caps):

"THERE WAS NO ERROR IN DATA TRANSFER AT ALL. IT WENT FINE. ALL MY OTHER POKEMON DATA IS STILL THERE, BUT NOT SCARLET. I had mons from my original GBA up to current on there. Literally 20 years worth of data. There's nothing I can do. I don't even know if i wanna play anymore."

They are not alone, as others in the Reddit thread have chimed in with similar, if not quite as dramatic, tales of tragedy. Interestingly IGN notes that one of its staff members encountered this problem, too.

If this has happened to you, what can you do? Well, one suggestion aired on Reddit is to contact Nintendo, who may be able to restore a lost save. There are a couple of claims that this has happened in the past as a one-off, but more skeptical types are saying that Nintendo can't do this. (And that sounds right to us, in all likelihood, though we guess there's no harm in trying - especially not in the case of ThatOtaku26, given that this episode has now garnered a lot of attention).

Warning: Head for Home

Of course, this warning is more useful not to those already affected, but as a reminder to gamers about to embark on the upgrade from a Switch to Switch 2 - be as careful as you can with your data. In the case of Pokémon, this has the Home service which provides a cloud-based backup - though you do have to pay a subscription fee for storing more than 30 creatures.

However, for those with an expansive collection of critters, just paying for a single month while you perform your Switch 2 migration is probably a sensible move, in the light of these stories.

So, you have been warned - splash the cash, or run the risk of a data loss Pokémon catastrophe.

Or, another suggestion made by some other posters, and an observation from the OP too, is that you should manually transfer all your non-cloud save data first, before performing the system transfer. But to ensure you're bulletproof, if you really value your collection, Pokémon Home is the ticket.