Booting a copy of SteamOS for the first time erases Steam install directory without checking if it's already there.

[foxt]

SteamOS installs seem to have a flag that determines if they have ever been booted or not. (in the hold '...' button menu, they just show up as 'Previous B' instead of 'Previous SteamOS-B-...'), and when booted will do something that actually downloads SteamOS and installs it proper. It seems however, when one of these not-quite-fully-installed-SteamOS boots up, it erases the Steam install directory, along with all user settings, installed games & save files, without any confirmation from the user.

Now, it's unlikely an average user would run into this (I think you'd only be able to do this by doing a reimage, and then copying files back onto the Deck before booting for first time, or if the user uses the '...' boot menu to boot into a secondary B partition, when no secondary partition is present.), but its still annoying that my Deck just wiped my games without asking

[foxt]

it also erased the SD Card??????? Questionable behaviour????

[JD-The-65th]

I've run into a similar issue with the same end result twice, the first time, it reset random folders on my Home Partition but saved my SD card, but the second time I ran into this issue, it basically fully reset my Home Partition, leaving over some scraps of files, and wiping my SD card as well.

This issue doesn't seem to be exclusive to booting SteamOS for the first time, it can happen during some concerningly easy edge cases that tinkerers can run into.

So far, this bug has appeared to me twice by using SteamOS's Nested Desktop while in Game Mode, and launching Steam Desktop while still in Game Mode. Something about this makes steam panic, wipe the installation, and attempt to reset any partitions it can, not just Steam Stuff. It put me back in the first-time setup menu, but it remembered my WIFI password and time zone, and had a weird "Updating SteamOS" menu that did nothing. When I hard restarted it, it asked for my WIFI password, made me log back into steam, and my Home Partition was practically reset, save for some odd files.

Now granted, I had Symbolically linked my compatdata folder to my SD card, but it shouldn't have gotten rid of nearly every other folder on it. Everything except for some random folders (including steamapps of all of them) on my 1TB SD card got wiped. Hoping someone with knowledge of recovering files stumbles upon this, nearly 500gb of important files just got wiped, and my basic attempts at recovery with ext4magic appear to be a sisyphean task alone.

TL;DR: Can confirm this issue (with a different method of causing it) has existed for at least a year, wiped home drive once, and now home drive and SD card.