I am considering the new OLED deck, but one thing that will be a huge hassle is if I have to reiinstall the Steam library. Currently, I have my steam library only installed on SD cards (the internal drive is used for the OS, utilities and shaders, etc…). So when I want to play a game I drop in the appropraite SD card like a Nintendo Switch and the Deck detects the games automatically because the install path is saved to some configuration file.
However, I am wondering if I were to upgrade to the Switch OLED, is there anyway to transfer over the installation files so that I can continue to just drop in SD cards with the games? I know that it is possible to link games to a different install folder in the new OLED, but even that will take a very long time as I have to go through each game on each SD card and I believe Steam will also go and verify each and every game. I am hoping there is a way to fool the new OLED just continuing to run as if all the games are installed on the SD cards (beacuse they are)?
I’m in the same boat here and would love some clarity on this. Someone said that simply moving the microSD card to the new Steam Deck would work, but what would this look like in practice? You startup the new OLED model, login to Steam, the SD notices none of the games are installed locally, you plug in the SD card from the old Steam Deck and Steam OS magically goes through and recognizes the installed games and marks them as installed in your OLED Steam Deck library?
What about other preferences and settings?
This is actually how it works. Steam has a database of all the games you installed and where you installed them, and it will look for them there. If the media is removed, it stays greyed out until the media is reinserted. The only problem is, I have no clue where Steam stores this database, only that it is somewhere on your main drive. If you move the entire drive over, you would automatically move the hidden database file and so you won’t have to reinstall your games. What would be better though is if Steam has an actual database export utility for this situation for people who might not want to move the entire hard drive over.