PSA: Please Don’t Forget To Transfer Your Animal Crossing: New Horizons Island To Your Switch OLED

The Switch OLED launches tomorrow, and no doubt a great many of you are waiting expectantly for your console to arrive on your doorstep. The thrill of new gaming hardware is certainly one of life’s little pleasures, but don’t allow your excitement to overwhelm you, as it did us.

As you’ll know from our recent review, we’ve had the Switch OLED for a week now, and when it arrived from Nintendo, we literally couldn’t wait to get all of our data transferred over from our old console. We followed the transfer guide to the letter and had everything set up in double-quick time – save for one very important thing: our Animal Crossing: New Horizons island.

While Nintendo supports data transfer from console to console, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is different. You can only save one island to a single system, so the island data is treated somewhat differently to typical save data. It also cannot be saved using Nintendo Switch Online’s cloud backup service. Instead, you need to use a special transfer tool to move the island from one console to another – and guess what we forgot to do?

Yep, like complete fools, we did the system transfer and then handed off our old launch-model Switch to a family member, who duly started their own Animal Crossing island on the console under a new account – thereby removing the ability to transfer our old island to the Switch OLED. And before you ask, no, we hadn’t enabled the island backup system, either (not that we’d have relished the challenge of convincing Nintendo our old Switch had been ‘lost or broken’, of course).

This means we’ve effectively lost many months of progress, islanders and memories due to our over-enthusiasm. Don’t be in the same boat, and make sure you transfer your island to your new Switch OLED before giving the old console to someone else!