Topic: All SD card data suddenly all deleted

Hey NL,

Long time lurker, first time poster.
So in anticipation for Pokemon X/Y I went and picked up a new limited edition XL. I performed the system transfer and everything went just fine.
After the transfer I booted up Minish Cap to see how the GBA games looked, then turned it off. When I turned it back on again I was greeted with a "Creating System Management" or something along those lines. After looking at my menu all my Virtual Console and Digital Downloads were gone. Nothing in Data Management, or on my computer. The card is totally blank according to Windows. I didn't take the SD card out while it was on or anything. This is the second time this has happened. It also happened on my original 3DS out of nowhere.
Only this time I may have lost over 35 hours of Animal Crossing data.
Is there anything I can do?

Thanks in advance!

Hmm, go into the e-Shop and check your downloads, is everything still there?

If the data is deleted, you are screwed about recovering it, but you can re-download them.

I hope you find a solution. I'd take the loss of my animal neighbors pretty hard (as I did losing one in a stupid grass regrowing incident).

Your story inspired me to backup my SD card to my computer. Things seem to be going well, but I didn't know if I had inserted it correctly the first time, so now I'm worried I corrupted it when I pulled it out. I don't think the computer had even had time to recognize it, but we'll see.

I solved it! Apparently all the data was still on my old 3DS SD card, which I thought was all deleted.
So I copied all the data to my PC and my new SD card. So it's all good now.
Not sure why it got deleted in the first place though.

That's great to hear. Losing hours of playtime can be literally depressing, at least for me. And, my backup worked fine, too.

When the 3DS detects a card that hasn't been properly formatted by to work with it, it will just format it automatically.

Maybe because I hadn't used the new SD that came with the XL before the transfer, it wasn't formatted yet. But it detected the problem after I had transferred all my data.

I lost my original AC:NL data to a glitchy sd card. 35 hours. I eventually made another avatar, but it took me awhile to get over that. Glad you resolved your problem.

@Ralizah: omg i can't even imagine how hard losing my AC:NL data would be, how long was it before you were able to even look at the game again? D:

If that ever happened to me, my mom would be so depressed for the rest of the year.

She got sad at the prospect of buying another copy of the game for herself because she would lose her house and her neighbors wouldn't be the same D:

For a game in which very little of note really happens, I was surprised how hard I took it. It felt like an actual loss of some kind, rather than a few minutes of swearing up a storm followed by re-establishing a new character, which is my normal procedure when something like this happens. I spent a week unable to even think about playing it again. I eventually set up a new character, but it took me a long time to re-identify myself with the new avatar. My next two weeks of playing were very. .. rote. It took a long time before I was able to feel a touch of the old magic. But even today, I'm still unable to feel as involved in the game as I was with my original character. Part of that I chalk up to simple familiarity with the title. But I also think a tiny piece of my gaming self died with that original character.

TL;DR Animal Crossing saves are srs bizness!

@Morphtorok My mother probably has over a thousand hours invested in that game by now. I'm not using hyperbole, either. I can't imagine her losing all of that.

I am glad you got this fixed, but I recommend you make regular backups of your SD cards to avoid any future headaches.

What I got out of this thread:
All Moms love to play Animal Crossing. It's apparently not just my Mom who likes it.

Not sure with Animal Crossing taking backups will help. Afaik it has its own protection and you cannot do stuff like revert.

that's the inherent problem with non journalling file systems FAT32 is a crappy file system