I’ve never transferred Pokemon between gens and I’ve never used Pokemon Home, but it seems wild to me to be so invested into such a fickle storage system. Thoughts and prayers for the guy affected
Is there no way to backup your saves before attempting the transfer? Like just copy the save file?
Nope, the switch only keeps saves on the internal storage or synced to their cloud if you pay for it. When doing transfers between devices like this there is no copy option only a move and delete.
There are some legitimate reasons they want to prevent this like preventing users from duplicating items in multiplayer games, etc. Even if you got access to the files they are encrypted so that only your user can use them.
I think the bigger reason they do this is there are occasionally exploits that are done through corrupted saves. So preventing the user from importing their own saves helps protect the switch from getting soft modded.
If you mod your switch you can get access to the save files and since it has full access it can also decrypt them, so that you can back them up. One of several legitimate reasons to mod your switch.
Another case of piracy having far superior user experience compared to the legal, honest way of playing the game, not because piracy is intrinsically better but because the publisher deliberately makes the official experience as inconvenient and exploitative as possible.
I used to have a git repo in my emulator’s save directory so I could have checkpoints that I can restore to if I ever get stuck.
Basically…
Pokemon from Gens 3~7 (2000s to early 2019) can only be brought forward using a system that will no longer be officially supported at some point.
Pokemon in Gens 8 and 9 (the Switch games) are mostly considered “current”, and can be swapped around between any current game and Pokemon Home.
Pokemon Home costs money to store Pokemon.
Generally, moving Pokemon between generations involves transferring them using some special tool. The final destination (unless you want to pay money) is usually a game, because that’s where you can actually use them. The games also have plenty of storage that’s “free” (at least, not subscription-based).
Pokemon in the games had been stored inside cartridges from Gen 1 to Gen 7 (90s to early 2019). It was only with the Switch that game saves (and thus Pokemon) stopped being saved to the cartridges, and instead were saved to the console’s internal storage (not even an SD card).
Until 2019, getting a new console for your Pokemon games meant nothing – you’d be able to use your old Pokemon and saves on the new console by plugging in your old game.
This is the first time you had to do anything special to get your saves onto your new console.
For added context, Nintendo offers a cloud saves for players to back up their Switch game saves.
Pokemon is the one of the only Nintendo franchises to not support cloud saves.
