Thanks to another poster here, it came to light that a new Steam Recovery OS image is available for OS 3.5.

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/1B71-EDF2-EB6D-2BB3

For those uninitiated, this image can be burned to a recovery USB or microSD card and used to rescue your Deck in the case of misfortune or idiocy (yes, people actually DO try to delete the .local folder).

Everyone should have a recovery media in their toolbox and they should have it BEFORE misfortune hits - not scrambling to make/get one after the fact. Especially if you don’t have a Windows PC on ready hot standby.

While we’re talking about this … don’t burn the image to a device and tuck it away without testing it first. Based on this sub, 8 out of 10 people are using devices that do NOT show up in the Steam boot menu. One individual had to go through 5 different USB drives to get one that “worked”. Can’t know for sure unless you test it. Just make sure you can boot the device up to the desktop - then shutdown, take it out and put it away for that proverbial rainy day.

My recommendation has been - and shall continue to be - buying a dedicated, known working flash drive for this purpose. This is what I use (I have five of them and they all work):

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01EZ0X3L8/?th=1

Sandisk 64GB - $11 - Amazon Prime - Sold and Shipped by Amazon. You could get the smaller one, but the price is the same, so might as well go for the bigger one.

For those of you tech heads that have a IODD ST400, you can actually use it for Steam Deck recovery - as outlined in my video here:

• IODD ST400 MultiBoot Selector External Enclosure (feat. Steam Deck)

Please spare me the Ventoy rhetoric, please. I love this solution - and it can be used for so much.

I warn you with peace and love that if you have one of these and you already set it up for Steam Recovery - there is no way (no easy way anyway) to update the recovery partitions - I had to write the Steam Recovery image over top and rebuild my exFat partition of tools (but like a good technophile - I keep a backup - so no big deal).

Your ability to recover from catastrophe is directly proportionate to your efforts in readiness. :)