Nintendo Switch 2 owners urged not to skip crucial step setting up their new consoles

Hey, are you one of the lucky few that managed to fight your way through a bunch of rowdy crowds/successfully stand (virtually) in an (online) queue and snag a Nintendo Switch 2 on day one?

Well, if you’re just about to set up your new Nintendo console prior to reading this, you may want to keep your eye out for one very specific prompt during the process.

That is, of course, unless you fancy wasting hours of your time rectifying said mistake afterwards.

In a thread titled “PSA WARNING TO ALL SWITCH 2 NEW USERS LOOKING TO TRANSFER FROM SWITCH 1” over on the r/NintendoSwitch2 subreddit by one very shouty individual, users are being warned to keep one crucial step in mind before setting their consoles up for the first time.

“This should be made apparent to people but if you skip the system transfer option in setup the option is unavailable until you factory reset the console again,” writes user 18serioustech.

“So it may be a good idea to warn people since they'll be setting up their console soon.”

And, they even linked a handy video from YouTuber SwitchForce to help walk you through the process.

As 18serioustech warns, if you somehow manage to overlook this step during the initialisation process, then I hope you enjoyed setting up your console the first time around… because you’ll have to do it for a second time if you want all your old saved data on your new system.

So that means if you were to go back and do this again, you’ll probably lose all of the new data you’ve saved on your Nintendo Switch 2 (unless you can back it up on a physical device, and then transfer it over).

On the plus side, once you’ve done it properly, you’ll never have to do it a second time.