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)?
Not yet. I found this article in which one of designers says “One other thing we’ll be shipping soon is the ability to do local network transfer from one Steam Deck to another, so you can transfer your library across Decks without having to re-download.” - but this doesn’t mean we’ll be able to transfer settings and custom stuff as well. And it’s not out yet.
So probably no solution for now.
For you, u/spartan_jack008 and other people that will look for this solution - use Clonezilla.
It clones/duplicates your entire Steam Deck to an external HDD/SD card and then you use Clonezilla again to extract everything back on the deck.
Just write on YouTube “Clonezilla Steam Deck” and there will be a guy showing exactly how to do it step by step