We are getting questions about this many MANY times a day - so let’s put this somewhere central where everyone can chime in with their solutions. I’ll try to update this main OP with additional solutions as they trickle in below.
To my knowledge, at the time of this posting, there are no resources for doing this outside of hypotheticals that have not yet been tested proper. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Please contribute to this discussion and I’ll do my best to keep it as fresh as possible.
- Can I take the drive out of my LCD Deck and put it in my OLED Deck without issue?
Valve has said this works well provided you have the OG Deck on OS 3.5.x prior to the transplant. Several YTers did this, but had issue booting and other problems. They do not indicate what OS they were on at the time. “Valve said” works for me - but I would probably wait for an honest real world test with regression testing follow up; trust but verify. - What do I have to copy from my LCD Deck to my OLED Deck to get a “full backup”?
I’ve seen several opinions here; none tested to my knowledge. /home/deck appears to be the magic directory that if you copy everything from there - including all files and folders, technically you should “get it all”. I’m guessing this method will either not work properly or cause issues. If/when someone documents it on video - in front of you - I’d buy it. Until then …? - Can I clone my LCD Deck to my OLED deck without removing the drives or even opening the case?
Yes, this should be possible. Clonezilla should allow you to clone the internal SSD on the LCD, then you can “restore it” over top of the OLED’s drive. You’re going to need a LIVE boot drive for Clonezilla, an external hard drive at least as big as your LCD Deck’s SSD and I would expect the procedure to take many hours. Again, to my knowledge this hasn’t been tried/documented. Same rules about OS3.5 on the LCD Deck first should be applicable here. - I don’t care about anything but my EmuDeck setup. I can’t lose that!
EmuDeck has your back. There is a EmuDeck specific backup system offered here. I haven’t seen anyone produce a video of it yet, so I’m cautiously optimistic. This is, however, the method I plan to use when my OLED comes, so if you want to wait around - I’ll be doing it and you know I’ll include any nonsense that happens along the way. - Will my LCD Deck SD card just pick up and move over to the OLED Deck?
In theory, yes. If it is JUST Steam games, the card should auto mount and the games available in Steam. What I haven’t heard about yet is if the mount point of the card WILL be backward compatible - it may mount, but it won’t “be” where the other card was (aka run/media/mmcblkp1) it might be somewhere else - so that could break “non-vanilla stuff” that is counting on that particular mount point. If anyone can verify, that would be great. If you decided to symlink system content on the LCD Deck? Those aren’t going to get magically restored - you’re going to have to do all that again. If you moved CompatData folders over there? Non-steam games are not going going to show up without being manually readded and the content on a per CompatData folder be moved. - Where is <content x> stored on the Steam Deck so I can back that up separately?
This all depends on which content you mean. Some people are very concerned about custom artwork, for example. Last I checked (someone please cross check me), the custom artwork is stored in several places on the Deck - and I believe you’ll have to get them all if you want to lift and shift. - How are non-steam games handled? How can I move all those over without a clone?
This represents a challenge I’m not sure how to overcome. Non-steam games are not like Steam games which all have a Steam generated ID that is the same regardless of system. But non-steam games have random ids (and hence folders) on a per system basis. You would either have to create a new non-Steam game entry and symlink/launcher command link it to the “old” folder, or copy the contents from the OG non-steam game folder to the new non-steam game folder (I am not even sure that would work). If you have a rather large collection of non-steam stuff? Clone/Image/lift and shift SSD would be your best choice.
You must log in or register to comment.
Forgive the basic question, but what do you mean “live boot drive” under the clonezilla option?
Well, you need a means to boot Clonezilla without the OS. So download Clonezilla, flash it to a usb drive, boot from that.
Number 7 shouldn’t really pose a problem when you are switching the SSD or cloning it since all the wine configs don’t change and the non steam game entries added are available in the Steam folder
Right.
I have a month old OG steam deck and the announcement of the new steam deck really sucked! Are there ways to exchange the old steam deck or perhaps return it to steam to be sold as refurbished units? Ideally I would like to clone the SSD before handing it over. Also I am in a country where there is no official support from steam.
I believe the existence of any sort of exchange program at least on an official level has been denied by Valve.
Is there a way to sell it back so that steam can sell them as refurbished a unit?
Always worth messaging support and see if they’re willing to at least offer you the difference in steam wallet credit.
Would we be able to buy the OLED screen as a replacement part and put it into the OG deck? The screen panel seems to be the same size just smaller bezels. It should be as easy as we are just connecting a ribbon cable? I don’t think it should affect battery life as OLEDs are more power efficient unless we crank up the brightness to max always. If this is possible, then I don’t need to switch as the screen was the only real thing that got me excited. The rest of the changes are really good, but I am happy with my 1 month old steam deck and can’t afford to buy the new device.
It has been made abundantly clear both by Valve and many content creators that there is no way to retrofit the OLED panel into the old deck. They completely changed the internals of the deck to get the OLED in there.
How about using a new 2TB SSD? Should copying everything to the new drive and install work?
What if I’m running my system the vanilla way and just want the Steam games and Deck settings to transfer, no emulation or mods?
Deck settings are scattered everywhere. You would probably need the whole deck/home folder. No one has reported trying that though.
my custom controller configs were all saved to my Steam profile and auto-added on my oled once I signed in. same thing with my games that had online backup for the saves. I only had to manually move my non-steam game (along with its artwork) and I’ve made a backup of a game I had saved only to my deck (my kid played it on my desktop and it only has so many save slots, so I let those be the cloud backup)
my emudeck setup is a bit of a mess so I’m just keeping that backed up on ext hd and letting my oled have a clean setup. I’ll re-add those games as I want to play them.
I used Rescuezilla to transfer everything from my 512 LED to my 1TB OLED. It’s just clonezilla with a gui, I chose it 'cos clonezilla requires a keyboard to press clrl-c at one point and with rescuezilla you can just tap on the screen. Overall pretty easy, worked first try! Decky, emudeck, etc all working perfectly out the gate. I made sure to update the LED to 3.5 first!
I used balena etcher to make a bootable usb c drive for rescuezilla, and backed up the internal drive onto a micro SD card. It took about 90 minutes to backup and another 90 to recover.
The screen will be sideways the whole time but that didn’t matter to me, still easy
Yeah, Rescuezilla is the “non-keyboard” and “non-mouse” solution.