How to save and restore your island
Cloud saves on Nintendo Switch are often fairly straightforward and happen automatically from the start. Animal Crossing: New Horizons never makes it easy, as it requires you to activate it in-game first.
To do this, start the game and wait until you get to the title screen. Rather than pressing the A button like you normally would here, you want to press - to take you to the settings. This will take you to another area with Tom Nook where he first says that every child should have adult help and then gives you a few options.
Once Tom Nook gives you an option, you want to select the third option, which is Island Backup. From there you will have more options, in which you want to choose Enable island backup. After enabling this, you will have to wait until you are exited from the game and your Switch is still connected to the internet for your island itself to be uploaded to the cloud.
While you might think that this means you can either transfer your island to log in with your account, or go back and correct a mistake you made by simply reloading your island on your existing Switch, this is not the way to go. case here. In fact, there are only a few times you can restore your saved island, including if your Switch has been broken, stolen, or lost. For each of these, you'll have to work with Nintendo to get that back. Before that, it was impossible to get your island back if something happened, so there is at least one method to help you out.
For those still waiting to be able to move your island to another Switch system, Nintendo is still saying the update will arrive later this year. However, we don't know when, so you'll have to keep waiting. Even so, it's great to have an emergency backup with the number of hours people spent on their islands in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
