Hello! After being a lurker for over a decade, I created an account here in order to ask this question and get more involved with the Switch hacking scene.
I currently have a clean Switch (my first ever Switch) running the latest 8.0.1 firmware. I do intend to keep the console itself completely clean in order to avoid any possible Nintendo console ban. 100% of my games have been played on this console, and thus all of the saves are apparently on its internal memory only - no exceptions (thanks, Nintendo ).
I was not aware of this limitation until today, and I had recently purchased a second Switch tablet with the intent to hack however I pleased. I never intend to use this second console online or for much regular gameplay. This console is also on the latest 8.0.1 firmware, and I'm currently using Atmosphere for all my hacking. One of the biggest interests I had in this endeavor was the ability to edit save files for all my games, and this is where I run into uncertainty.
After doing a little digging, it appears that, although you can't transfer save data from internal storage (e.g. via microSD), you can transfer save data from one console to another as long as they're both 8.0.0 or higher. That's good since both mine are! But in order to transfer the data between the two consoles, they have to be signed into the same Nintendo account. Here is my planned course of action for whenever I want to edit a save file that's currently on my clean Switch:
I apologize for the post's length - I just wanna make sure I'm thorough! And please feel free to delete this and direct me to another thread if there's already an answer to these questions.
I currently have a clean Switch (my first ever Switch) running the latest 8.0.1 firmware. I do intend to keep the console itself completely clean in order to avoid any possible Nintendo console ban. 100% of my games have been played on this console, and thus all of the saves are apparently on its internal memory only - no exceptions (thanks, Nintendo ).
I was not aware of this limitation until today, and I had recently purchased a second Switch tablet with the intent to hack however I pleased. I never intend to use this second console online or for much regular gameplay. This console is also on the latest 8.0.1 firmware, and I'm currently using Atmosphere for all my hacking. One of the biggest interests I had in this endeavor was the ability to edit save files for all my games, and this is where I run into uncertainty.
After doing a little digging, it appears that, although you can't transfer save data from internal storage (e.g. via microSD), you can transfer save data from one console to another as long as they're both 8.0.0 or higher. That's good since both mine are! But in order to transfer the data between the two consoles, they have to be signed into the same Nintendo account. Here is my planned course of action for whenever I want to edit a save file that's currently on my clean Switch:
- Have both consoles signed into my Nintendo account and on 8.0.1 firmware
- Run the save data transfer feature to move a game save from my clean console to my secondary one
- Utilize Checkpoint or some other save data manager to extract the save data to microSD
- Do whatever I want to the save data
- Get the save data back onto the console using Checkpoint (or whatever else) from microSD
- Run the save data transfer feature to move the edited save data from my secondary console back to my clean one
- Lastly, play whatever game's save I edited with the new edited game data
I apologize for the post's length - I just wanna make sure I'm thorough! And please feel free to delete this and direct me to another thread if there's already an answer to these questions.