Animal Crossing New Horizons: How to backup and restore your island save data

Wondering how the island backup feature works? We've got you covered
Summer Wave 2 update is live in New Horizons
Nintendo

Animal Crossing's next free update summer wave 2 has gone live, adding the ability to backup and restore your island save data.

Island backup is a feature which allows you to make a copy of your current island and save it to the cloud using Nintendo's Online membership.

If your Switch ever gets damaged, lost or stolen, this means you can simply download your data from the cloud on to a new Switch so you don't lose your progress.

This function, however, is limited and it is only available to you if you have an active Switch Online membership and if your current Switch can no longer be used.

How to back up and restore your island

First of all, you need to make sure you update Animal Crossing to the latest version of the game, which is now 1.4.0.

Once that's done, open up Animal Crossing on your Switch and when you get to the title screen press the minus button on your left JoyCon.

This takes you to the settings and you will see Tom Nook standing in a dark room explaining things to you — there will also be a new option for Save Backups.

Upon talking to Tom Nook, go ahead and click on the top option which says "Enable Island backup".

Tom Nook will walk you through the process
Nintendo

He will explain some things about it, but it's as simple as that. Once done, you can begin playing or exit the game.

After island backup is enabled, you can view the date and time of the last backup on the title screen.

What is island backup and restoration?

Island backup is a way for players to upload their Animal Crossing: New Horizons save data for safekeeping.

When you enable it, your New Horizons save data will be uploaded periodically via the internet automatically and it will not happen while you are actually playing the game.

If you upload your data using this service, it means you can restore it later to a new Switch console if your Switch gets broken or you manage to lose it.

This means that you will need a new or repaired Nintendo Switch to restore the data to, but then you'll be able to pick up where you left off.

You must have an active Nintendo Switch Online membership subscription to use this service.

How do you restore your island?

This service is only for use when your Nintendo Switch system has been lost or damaged in some way, which means you will need a brand new or repaired Switch console to download the data to.

If you have this, along with a copy of the game, you can then begin the process of restoring your island data to the new console.

As the game begins to open, you will see a black screen with the Nintendo logo in the top-left corner. Press and hold the – (minus) button when this screen appears.

If you did this right, you will see a message appear that asks if you want to check for island data to restore.

If you see Timmy and Tommy at the Nook Inc. reception desk, the button input failed. Close the game and reopen it to try again.

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