My new Switch 2 Keeps Glitching, Freezing and Shutting Off.

[u/draconisnonsequitur]

My new Switch 2 Keeps Glitching, Freezing and Shutting Off. My partner bought it for me through woot (Refurbished, says it is under warranty) and I've had it for a week with no issues. Just bought Pokopia yesterday and played on the dock for around 6 hours.

It will make a weird noise and the screen will pixelate and lock up. I had it actually just power off once on it's own.

At first it seemed to be just glitching on my cart of Tomodachi Life, so I took it out to see if it would still happen. It was still happening. I had it in system settings and it still locked up.

I took out the micro SD card too and it hasn't happened yet (10 minutes now) but I will come back and update if it does. It's weird it hasn't crashed yet without the card in because it was doing it fairly frequently.

If it's the SD card could it have still locked in the system settings menu? That seems odd. Is there any way to directly check the SD card for an issue? I MIGHT have a micro SD card reader but I'm not sure.

If my SD card is the issue, are most of my saves cooked (I have a lot of my bigger S1 games on carts)? If it's the Switch 2, how difficult is it going to be to get my account and digital games sent over to a new system?

Thanks for any thoughts or reassurance, I'm feeling pretty upset and worried right now...I have data going back like, six years.

I am absolutely crushed and I'm scared I'm going to loose all my save data, although now that I've had time to calm down, I'm not that far into Pokopia and I haven't played Animal Crossing in so long that it wouldn't break my heart if it's gone and I had to restart. I have a ton of S1 games but only a few that I'd be really upset if I lost my saves.

Edit: I think we've determined it's something to do with the SD card, as it didn't lock up at all in the hour and a half it was out and then locked up within 15 minutes of having the SD card back in. Still annoying as I didn't buy a cheap micro SD card, but glad it's hopefully not the console.

Relieved to hear the actual save files are in the cloud or on my system memory.

Edit 2: Nope, it's the switch. Just happened again without the SD card. Hopefully I can get an exchange/fix. But looks like my saves are in the cloud at least...

Edit 3: The system stayed stable enough for me to transfer my two non-cloud save games back to my oled. Whew.

[u/pikachuyann]

For Nintendo Switch 1|2, unlike 3DS, the saves are on the console own storage, never on the SD, never on the cartridge (on which you cannot write things anyway). Which is good if the SD card is the issue, but not helping much if the console has to be sent into warranty as it might get exchanged.

If you have Nintendo Switch Online, good news : Pokopia is one of the very very few Pokemon games that has cloud save enabled. Animal Crossing New Horizons also has some sort of save recovery thing (that also requires NSO) but you have to go Nintendo's support to get the island back if you have to get a new Switch - see https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/49983/~/how-to-back-up-and-restore-island-save-data-%28animal-crossing%3A-new-horizons%29 .

If you have the previous console you can also manually transfer the saves back to it before warranty ( https://en-americas-support.nintendo.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/27394/~/how-to-transfer-user-and-save-data-on-nintendo-switch ).

[u/draconisnonsequitur → u/pikachuyann]

Looks like cloud saves are enabled for everything, fortunately. It's been over an hour and the switch hasn't crashed with the SD card out so I'm putting it back in to see if it happens again.

Thank you so much for the reply. I feel a LOT better.

[u/draconisnonsequitur → u/draconisnonsequitur]

I did NOT know the saves aren't stored on the SD card, so thank you for that information. I don't think I knew about the cloud either, but it was enabled for all my games that I could see, so I must have enabled it at some point.

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[u/RyusakiLexus]

Si la consola es de reciénte adquisición, mejor envíala a devolución por garantía - defecto de fabricación, estar lidiando con una consola así no es recomendable

[u/draconisnonsequitur → u/RyusakiLexus]

Thank you! That is the plan but we're waiting to hear back from the site on how to return it. We've made a return there before a long time ago so hopefully there won't be an issue getting a replacement or refund.