If you have decent internet speeds I would suggest just re-downloading. Might seem counter-intuitive, but it is the safer bet.

With the speeds of typical microSD cards imaging or simply transferring the content over would already take a pretty significant amount of time. If it were to fail in the middle of imaging all that time would be wasted and you'd have to try again.

Makes sense, and sounds good, thank you!

Sack that, either keep both & hotswap them with different games on each, or plug an external drive in, copy the games over to the external drive in desktop mode and then back to the new SD card

Insert SD card into SteamDeck and let it format it. Then copy all files from old SD card to new using Linux PC or if you have Dock with SD card slot.

Originally posted by darrenphillips666:

Sack that, either keep both & hotswap them with different games on each, or plug an external drive in, copy the games over to the external drive in desktop mode and then back to the new SD card

Problem is... you can't really do this when you are placing games such as emulators on the SD card, Using Emudeck, youd have to refresh whats on your card in the manager each time you swap, requiring to at least go to desktop mode.

I personally would clone it and later on just extend the usable storage in system.

Incase someone stumbles upon this thread this is the guide I found.
https://handheld.quest/posts/steam-deck-copy-microsd-card-contents-to-larger-drive/#i-bought-a-larger-sd-card-for-my-steam-deck---how-to-transfer-everything-without-breaking-apps--games

Since this thread is going to be locked anyway I'm going to use the opportunity.

Dear Mods:

You should either lock threads when they hit an age limit or not lock them at all. Waiting for new replies in order to lock old threads is the worst of both worlds. Old threads get pulled to the front (which seems to be what you dislike) but people can't reply to whatever new post got added.

After a couple days of endless questing for a solution to this, I must say none of the cloning methods worked for me. I kept losing a chunk of free-space (always left with around 20gb that was unalocated and I couldn't touch in KDE), the proccess lasted HOURS (like overnight) for a 512gb to 1tb upgrade using DD, so that it sort of prevented me from trying it again and again (and that I did...), and in the end I visually witnessed a 3% loss of battery health from a couple nights turned on doing disk operations.

The fastest it got on average was 20mb/s doing SD to SD (even if the new card was a SanDisk Extreme Pro). In the end I just gave up, manually copied RetroDeck files and refreshed the directories referenced (was super easy), then transferred the Steam library through SteamOS without problems, and MUCH faster write speeds. The couple titles where there would've been a big update required, I uninstalled and installed later, and even with fast internet that took MUCH longer than moving library items through SteamOS.

So I don't care about what anyone online says, do a DD copy if you have an extra Linux computer, but DO NOT do it on the Deck. I'm assuming that this operation isn't processor intensive enough to kick up the fan, but it uses enough resources to generate heat and permanently degrade battery life given its duration. The tradeoffs FAR OUTWEIGH the small hurdle of fixing some symlinks later.