Ouch!

My "oldest Tamagotchi" V3 needed a change of batteries earlier today.  As I've done many times in the past, I changed the batteries as soon as I saw the battery icon with the large X scrawled on top of it.

Unfortunately, after I successfully replaced the batteries, it didn't ask me if I wanted to Download or Reset.  It just asked me for the time, as if I resetted the game or just opened it for the very first time.  I pressed the reset button once again in hopes to have that download option, but to no avail. 

My tamagotchi was gone.

I don't mind the missing gotchi points, the items, the extra food and snacks as they can be easily replaced.  However, the friends list and more importantly, the generations logged can no longer be retrieved.  I have to start from scratch again, climbing that generation ladder one generation at a time.

I don't have a log at hand to know what generation my last tamagotchi was in, but since the V3 was released around 4 years ago already, I can only assume that it had a lot.

Oh well.  I just hope that this instance was only a glitch, and not a hardware failure (meaning when the batteries die again, everything is lost once more).  After all, it is indeed old.