When I bought my Steam Deck over a year ago, I purchased the basic model with a very unassuming 64GB eMMC module for primary storage. I knew this wouldn't be enough on its own for holding the games I like to play, so I've gotten by with having my Steam library installed on an SD card. This has worked surprisingly well, despite the lower performance of the SD card when compared to something like an NVMe. Load times, etc actually weren't all that bad! Alas, all good things must come to an end... I started having issues with the eMMC drive filling up and I was constantly interrupted with "low storage space" notifications in Steam. I guess Steam stores saved games, Mesa shader cache, and other things like that on the primary drive despite having gobs of space on SD storage. Oops!

Since I can't be bothered to enter my Steam login, WiFi credentials, etc a second time on my Deck, I really wanted to preserve/transfer as much data from the eMMC to a new NVMe drive as possible. That's what this post is about. Spoiler alert: I was successful, and it was relatively easy/painless.