Steam Deck

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Noob Question: What's your process for backing up your Steam Deck? (kbin.social)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've got an RMA on my Deck over a sticky button issue, so I ordered a 1TB external drive online to back it up before wiping and sending it off.

What's the bare minimum you would recommend I back up if I just want to preserve my desktop settings, apps, and some non-steam game content (since much of that is already tied to my account)?

Is it just a matter of copying folders over in desktop mode or is there an official (or recommended) backup tool I should use?
Would Syncthing, which I use to transfer files normally, be a reliable method to use my Mac as a potential backup location?

Thank you for any advice.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Settings of apps installed via Discover are stored in /home/deck/.var/app. Settings of the desktop and pre-installed apps including Steam are stored in /home/deck/.config and /home/deck/.local/share.

For backing up I wouldn't bother much with differentiating between stuff I want to keep and stuff I don't. I'd back up everything in my home folder with sudo rsync -avP /home/deck /WhateverTheLocationOfTheDriveIs. Let the Deck format the drive for you and then this command will copy the whole deck folder over and preserve all permissions. You can start it over if you get interrupted for some reason and it will pick up where it left of.

I'd only worry about what to copy back when setting everything back up again. But I probably would just start everything from scratch to get rid of garbage.