Gaming Help/tips needed to recover a .sav

[robplease]

I recently replaced the SD card in my 3DS with a new SD card. That new SD card failed and I lost all the data on it. I still had the week-old files on my computer from the old SD card, so I copied those and put them back on my 3DS. But, when I start AC:NL I get the "cannot use save data because it was not the last data saved" error. This is because I played and saved AC:NL after this .sav was created, so it's an old .sav, but it's the only one I have!

Is there a way to recover my town? I tried re-downloading AC:NL and putting the .sav in the correct folder on the SD card, but I either get the "cannot use save data because it was not the last data saved" error or "save data corrupt" error when I do this.

Sorry, I am very new to the hacking community, so I don't know what terms to search. I saw this thread, but I don't use a flashcard so I don't have a garden.dat file or anything, I think. This is on my original 3DS trying to play a legit eshop version AC:NL.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[robplease]

I've been trying some things for a while. First I tried altering some of the bytes in the .sav file to see if the game would accept it, but I guess I didn't know what I was doing really.

Then I tried to get my digital .sav onto a cartridge by using Powersaves. I noticed the Powersaves backup files were exactly like the digital .sav files, but Powersaves errors out and won't write my save.

Lastly, I tried to get my .sav read through the save data backup utility. I downloaded AC:NL, then deleted it and created a save data backup. I found the save data backup folder, put my .sav in it, and redownloaded AC:NL to restore my .sav. I still got the "cannot use save data because it was not the last data saved" error.

Any suggestions, tips, or pointers would be a great help, I'm desperate to recover my town