Disclaimer: Use this at your own risk! I'm not responsible if this gets you banned or if the laws in your country get you and your moms in jail. While I'm pretty sure these steps are fine, I can't guarantee it!

To those of you who are aware of what's technically doable, this guide probably goes without saying but I thought I'd mention it here anyway. I just thought of a way of transferring my savegame of Tears of the Kingdom that has the glitched non-breakable master sword to the Switch 2. But this should also work with any downloaded 100 % save or cheated PKMN shiny savegames and what not.

It's basically pretty simple. I'll break it down in short points:

1. Take a modded Switch 1 where you are able to boot Atmosphère.
2. Boot into a stock (aka non-CFW) clean sysNAND. By "clean" I mean you didn't use any LayeredFS mods or installed stuff with homebrew installers. In short, everything that gets you banned.
3. Launch the games you want to transfer the saves for at least once. Needless to say the have to be legitimately (either a physical cart or a legally obtained eShop game).
4. Keep the Switch offline (enable airplane mode or delete the WiFi connection) and reboot into the sysNAND but this time with Atmosphère.
5. Use Checkpoint to inject your modded saves.
6. Reboot to stock (aka not using Atmosphère).
7. Now you're good to go. Just use the official system transfer feature to transfer everything to a vanilla Switch 2. You could even restore a NAND backup on your Switch 1 afterwards if you wanna circumvent the forced factory reset that comes with this process.

A closure note:
Obviously I can't test this guide yet. It should work from what I know about the Switch 1 and how Nintendo described the system transfer.
However I used this method in the past to transfer modded savegames from my modded emuNAND to my sysNAND. For example I did this with Diablo III and Mario Maker 2, both of which I then used online without getting banned to this day.

By the way, you could theoretically skip a few steps from above and just use Atmosphère right away without booting back and forth. Those steps are just "the safest way" of doing it and honestly I'd recommend sticking to them.

 

[MasterJ360]

Thats pretty much how I transfer a copy of my pkmn saves from hacked switch to oled switch. Should be no different than the S2.

 

[mrniach]

Could be a potential entrypoint to hacks by injecting malicious payloads in to the savegame to then exploit potential switch 1 games flaws?

 

[Sir Tortoise]

Could be a potential entrypoint to hacks by injecting malicious payloads in to the savegame to then exploit potential switch 1 games flaws?

Never say never but if the Switch 1 wasn't vulnerable to that I doubt the Switch 2 will be. Otherwise we'd have a method of hacking patched Switches by system transfer from an unpatched Switch.

 

[lordelan]

Could be a potential entrypoint to hacks by injecting malicious payloads in to the savegame to then exploit potential switch 1 games flaws?

I like the way you think.

 

[masagrator]

Could be a potential entrypoint to hacks by injecting malicious payloads in to the savegame to then exploit potential switch 1 games flaws?

No because of two reasons:
- Games that don't support JIT have no way to execute anything else than what was loaded at boot and it's not possible to change that code from inside of game.
- In games that do support JIT or you are thinking about using ROP -> whole Application ecosystem is sandboxed. Trying to access anything that was not permitted at boot is prohibited. That's why you have literally 0 exploits relying on games nowadays. You would need to escape that sandbox first which is definitely not a trivial task, bordering with impossible on game consoles.

---

I was thinking about this idea in terms of porting saves that have some nice game modding potential. Like unlocking 720p in Witcher 3 for backwards compatibility + performance stats. But according to some people, it's possible for Nintendo to track if your save was modded by looking at telemetry. I guess this was not enforced in Switch 1, but we will see for Switch 2.

 

[Pienkaito]

With the Switch 2 now in the wild, is anyone a hero and tried this guide?
I have modded Switch 1 with a CFW Sysnand, which is not banned, but surely not clean.
I was wondering if I could do the following steps.

1. Convert my current CFW Sysnand to an Emunand
2. Clean my Sysnand with Haku33
3. Transfer my Savefiles from Emunand to Sysnand (Not sure if/how that works?)
4. Then follow this guide

Can anyone with experience tell if this works?

 

[Loltag22]

With the Switch 2 now in the wild, is anyone a hero and tried this guide?
I have modded Switch 1 with a CFW Sysnand, which is not banned, but surely not clean.
I was wondering if I could do the following steps.

1. Convert my current CFW Sysnand to an Emunand
2. Clean my Sysnand with Haku33
3. Transfer my Savefiles from Emunand to Sysnand (Not sure if/how that works?)
4. Then follow this guide

Can anyone with experience tell if this works?

I successfully transferred a savefile using NSO... But I had a super clean 4.1.0 backup with no fuses burnt. It fell like going back to the past lol.

 

[DSX2]

1. Launch the games you want to transfer the saves for at least once. Needless to say the have to be legitimately (either a physical cart or a legally obtained eShop game)

Interested in this point - why do we need to own the game?

If i have a downloaded game, would i be able to transfer saves with checkpoint etc IF i was to buy the game at a later date? Im not completely across how save files work (i,e are they tied to the specific game download)

 

[Loltag22]

Interested in this point - why do we need to own the game?

If i have a downloaded game, would i be able to transfer saves with checkpoint etc IF i was to buy the game at a later date? Im not completely across how save files work (i,e are they tied to the specific game download)

Mine was an xci... The saves works for now with legit copy

 

[Lazyt]

Can somebody make tutorial for dumbazz please? I dont know if i use sysnand or cfwnand i dont know what these word mean. I have a switch with atmosphere and i need to transfer just a single save to a switch 2

Post automatically merged: Jun 7, 2025

Can somebody make tutorial for dumbazz please? I dont know if i use sysnand or cfwnand i dont know what these word mean. I have a switch with atmosphere and i need to transfer just a single save to a switch 2

 

[Garro]

Just FYI. Step 3 is optional. Not sure about Checkpoint but JKSV can inject non-owned save files into the system. That's how I got my Pokémon Violet save file from the Emunand to Sysnand to move my mons into Pokemon HOME.

Post automatically merged: Jun 7, 2025

Just FYI. Step 3 is optional. Not sure about Checkpoint but JKSV can inject non-owned save files into the system. That's how I got my Pokémon Violet save file from the Emunand to Sysnand to move my mons into Pokemon HOME.

 

[lordelan]

With the Switch 2 now in the wild, is anyone a hero and tried this guide?

Yeah I did this myself and transferred both, my BotW save (which is even from my Wii U originally, then lived on on the S1, now on S2) and TotK.
"Restored" them on my OLED's clean sysNAND, paid for 3 months NSO, moved them to the cloud, moved the virtual cartridges to the S2, downloaded the saves there from the cloud, also applied the S2 upgrade packs for both games and everything's working perfectly fine.

I have to add that I feel like the cool guy at school for getting away with this.

If i have a downloaded game, would i be able to transfer saves with checkpoint etc IF i was to buy the game at a later date? Im not completely across how save files work (i,e are they tied to the specific game download)

They are not tied to a specific game's unique ID. Save files are generic.
I backed up my save from non-legit games in my emuNAND.
However on my sysNAND I legally bought and installed those games, then restored the save with Checkpoint, then used NSO Cloud Sync to get 'em to the Switch 2.
I would highly recommend only using NSO cloud saves with legit games. I wouldn't even connect a sysNAND to the internet that has at least one single non-legit game installed since that might get you banned.

 

[kikisland]

I just upload my gamesaves to the cloud on the hacked switch, then go offline and download them on the new switch, it’s not that risks because I don’t run backups up
Games. Also you can just connect two switches to the same network and transfer the gamesaves using the built in game save transfer instead. Been doing it since day 1

Post automatically merged: Jun 8, 2025

I just upload my gamesaves to the cloud on the hacked switch, then go offline and download them on the new switch, it’s not that risks because I don’t run backups up
Games. Also you can just connect two switches to the same network and transfer the gamesaves using the built in game save transfer instead. Been doing it since day 1

 

[lordelan]

Games. Also you can just connect two switches to the same network and transfer the gamesaves using the built in game save transfer instead. Been doing it since day 1

Yeah but that moves (not copies) the whole user with all his saves or is there another way I'm not aware of?

 

[kikisland]

Yeah but that moves (not copies) the whole user with all his saves or is there another way I'm not aware of?

Nope it transfers the selected save
It’s in the game menu when you press the + button

 

[Lumince]

Someone remind me in about a month or 2 to see if people get banned

 

[DbGt]

so if i only have "backups", whats the safest way to transfer the saves?

 

[lordelan]

Nope it transfers the selected save
It’s in the game menu when you press the + button

Wow, never noticed that! Thank you.
Since game saves themselves don't contain any traces of the fact that they were used on a hacked and shady emuNAND, this should even work directly between S1 emuNAND to S2 sysNAND. Would have saved me a lot of time if I knew this lol.

 

[DbGt]

Wow, never noticed that! Thank you.
Since game saves themselves don't contain any traces of the fact that they were used on a hacked and shady emuNAND, this should even work directly between S1 emuNAND to S2 sysNAND. Would have saved me a lot of time if I knew this lol.

But according to Nintendo website https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/45047

Both systems must be connected to the internet, and on the latest firmware. Also saves can only be transferred for users with same nintendo account on both systems, and saves will be deleted from the source once transferred.

So I dont know how safe it would be to do this while connected to the internet with a shady emunand on s1, and using the same user and nintendo account on both systems...