One time limit for Animal Crossing: New Horizons save data recovery if your Switch damaged or lost

We’ve been following the whole ‘no cloud saves’ and ‘data backup’ ordeal with Animal Crossing New Horizons for some time, and now during the Animal Crossing Direct earlier this morning we learned just a little bit more.

Nintendo had two main points, reconfirming with an entire slide that indeed the game will not support cloud saves as you would expect any other Switch game to – this we already knew.

They also reconfirmed that you’ll be able to backup your save somehow with a new method in the future. What was new is that you’ll only be able to do this one.

So if you lose your Switch, or your Switch is damaged and you get a new one – you can only retrieve your save file once from this service. The fine text reads “Nintendo Switch Online members can only have save data recovered one time due to loss or damage of system”.

This move is still really bizarre and will limit people buying a new console, or switching to a Lite or vice versa. While it’s good news that if your Switch is lost or damaged there will be some way to recover your island, it’s still not ideal.