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)?
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Before you do anything, I suggest back up your data with that out of the way I have 3 suggestions
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Just copy your entire /home folder, your configurations should just be there somewhere
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Just slap your old ssd to the oled. This one may be a little more risky, though it is still the same aystem overall so I don’t think anything bad will happen but to be safe I’d update steam os to the latest version just to avoid any potential issue
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Haven’t look into this yet but you can make an exact clone of your ssd content and put it in a new ssd
you know what? i’m just going to transfer the HOME folder and be done with it and then put in my 1TB micro SD card in there, do a few reboots and work from there, there doesn’t seem to be anything else up to date regarding this matter and i’m baffled with the amount of people who have brought a steam deck OLED model recently this isn’t a thing on how to get your data to the new model? 🤔 i’m legit amazed by this incompetence!
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Moving your SD card to new Steam Deck works - I con confirm this. But for me the question is how to clone my Steam Deck settings to a new one? I put some time in to plugins installation, emulator configuration and setting the Geforce Now / Playstation Remote solutions. It would be great to copy Steam Deck internal drive or at least configuration files in to new one.
This! Did you end up finding out a way how to do this without moving the SSD over?
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
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.
just a thought but. Its Linux. Why cant you just back it up and restore it on the new device. Backup the new one just so if it doesn’t work you can roll it back. That’s what I was planning to do.
I’m looking for a solution to this as well. Bought the OLED. I only store ROMS on my micro sd card for my OG Deck. Are there other files I should move to the micro sd card? Or am I going to have to reinstall emu deck, X Play, chiaki, etc…?
Following. I don’t have a ton of games on mine, but have things set up the way I like and if there’s an easy way to move from the LCD to the OLED I’d love to hear about that
Right now there are at least two different reviewers saying two different things on this topic. The first, and here I forget if it was Retro Game Corps or ETA Prime (I think it’s RGC) who said they did a straight up SSD transfer (i.e. no copying nothing), and it worked perfecto.
But Taki Udon says he did the exact same thing and there were some glitches such as hardware issues that he thinks Valve will eventually fix if we are patient.
So one guy says works fine, the other says will probably work fine in the future but not now. We will have to wait and see I guess?
BTW, if a straight SSD transfer were to work, then it would be the simplest way to transfer (you’d just do an SSD swaparoo between the two decks). Or you could use Macrium Reflect to duplicate on of the SSDs if you didn’t want to swap.
Thank you, this is helpful. My current deck is the 64gb with a 512gb sd card for most of my games, so it might just be easier to start from scratch. May also try coping the entire home folder over to see if that works. But the more I think about it, the more I conclude that setting things up again (configuring Chiaki4deck, etc.) will go much more quickly now that I know what im doing
Lemme know what you end up doing!
Also interested, it would be nice it there was some kind of file transfer or configuration transfer app like the ones that exist for smartphones