Wiped data

[bytes3]

Not sure if this is an issue, but just an heads-up

I ran into an accident today while trying to copy a game to my Steam Deck. My SteamOS unexpectedly got factory reset, and everything in the /home/deck directory was wiped.

I was transferring the files using Dolphin file manager from my main PC, accessing the Steam Deck via the mtp:// protocol. At the same time, I had also mounted the device using aft-mtp-mount ~/mnt android-file-transfer

Unfortunately, I don’t have any logs or solid evidence to explain exactly what went wrong—but I just want to warn others not to make the same mistake I did

[dafta]

Wow. I'm so sorry that happened.

I don't think this relates to DeckMTP, though, unfortunately. Was your whole system factory reset or just the /home/deck directory? Do you have an SD card and was it wiped as well? Did you change anything in /etc beforehand? And if you did, are the changes still there?

Are you on SteamOS stable, beta, or preview? What were you doing with the file transfer when this happened? Did you cancel it, browse the folders on MTP, or were you just waiting for it to finish?

Do you have system logs before this happened? If you try and do journalctl -b -1 (replace -1 with the number of times you rebooted your deck after this happened), do you get any output? Are there any kernel panics in the logs?

Once agan, I'm very sorry that this happened. I'll do my best to see with you why this happened and prevent it in the first place in the future.

[bytes3]

I’ve never used an SD card in my 512 GB Steam Deck OLED, and I have not touched anything in /etc since I bought the device. SteamOS was on the stable channel.

I first tried transferring the game by copying it with Dolphin, but the process was slow because it contained more than 5,000 files. I then mounted the Deck with aft‑mtp‑mount and cancelled the Dolphin transfer, planning to run checksums on the game files so I wouldn’t have to delete everything again. Although /home/deck was visible, subfolders such as ~/Downloads appeared empty.

Without unmounting the FUSE mount, I deleted some of the game’s folders and attempted the copy again in Dolphin.

I also had the PauseGames plugin running (https://github.com/popsUlfr/SDH-PauseGames), which I paused a game running in the background. When I recopied one of the folders I had just deleted, the paused game suddenly resumed and the Steam menu wouldn't appear.

I forced shutdown. After rebooting I saw the Steam login screen, logged in, started the Desktop session, and discovered that my /home/deck directory had been wiped; only about 12 GB of the 512 GB drive was in use.

Sorry I can't share any logs because I got frustrated and switched to Bazzite OS yesterday before making this issue. :(

[troy0h]

Hi, just had a similar issue on my Steam Deck OLED
SteamOS on stable, using the Decky plugin.

Was transferring a bunch of roms to my deck from my PC
I went to desktop mode afterwards to use the steam rom manager that's part of EmuDeck, they werent in the right format so they didnt get detected, so I deleted them from my PC, since I still had the folder open
After that, Dolphin started to glitch out a bit, so I rebooted, and then it seems to have factory reset my deck too
I had to sign back in as well