How I almost lost my Ring Fit Adventure save data

Yesterday I wanted to play Ring Fit Adventure on my Switch - I used to play a lot in 2020-2022 and wanted to get back into it a little. To my horror, when I launched the game, my user profile along with saves were missing.

Everything was empty with button prompting me to add new user. This was super strange because normally the game loads the user list from the Switch.

I tried various stuff from rebooting the game, checking the cloud backup status, deleting the game (or rather the updates) hoping it might do something. I also managed to find reddit post by someone who had the same issue and apparently did not solve it.

I was ready to give up and just forget about the game… However it seemed weird that not only I presumably lost saves, the game wasn’t able to show the users from Switch. So I started another round of searching the Internet…

This time, my searches wasn’t about lost save data but about the inability of Ring Fit Adventure to load my user. I found different reddit post (cannot find it again sorry), which mentioned that while trying to talk to Nintendo support, they noticed that the account is missing avatar…

It turns out, one of the accounts on my Switch was also missing an avatar (after previously converting local account to proper Nintendo one). I added the avatar and voila - all my users and data in Ring Fit Adventure appeared.

Seems the devs did not expect user account to be missing an avatar. Maybe if the game only failed the load the user without avatar I would be able to make the connection and find on my own but I thought I just lost it.