Accidentally deleted 3 TB: “The best thing that happened to my Steam Deck”

Downloading games, installing mods, setting up emulators and organizing the library – it's easy to spend hours tinkering with a Steam Deck without actually playing anything. That's exactly what happened to Reddit user u/Adsary46. He had accumulated around 3 TB of games across his SSD and memory card, yet had never finished a single story-driven game from beginning to end.

Most of his time apparently went into experimenting and organizing. Although he started plenty of games, he quickly lost interest and moved on to the next one. After all, there were more than enough installed. Then, one day, he says he accidentally deleted his entire installation. Instead of painstakingly rebuilding his collection, he removed the memory card and installed exactly one game from the Steam store: Portal 2. He had picked up the puzzle classic in a sale some time ago. Thanks to a cloud save, he was able to jump straight back in after the tutorial.

The urge to switch to something else whenever boredom set in was still there. This time, however, there was nothing else installed. So he stuck with it, took his time and eventually finished Portal 2. According to the Reddit user, he had never enjoyed his Steam Deck so much. Going forward, he's considering sticking to one game at a time and creating a separate category for completed titles.

Other solutions that don't involve deleting everything

Many commenters recognize the same pattern in their own gaming habits. However, there are other ways to limit the overwhelming number of choices and spend more time actually playing games – without having to delete an entire collection. We've previously covered a Steam Deck user who came up with a simple strategy for exactly this problem. He creates a Steam collection containing 5 to 30 games he genuinely wants to play and sorts them by "Last Played". If nothing immediately catches his interest, he works his way through the list and picks the last entry at the latest. More details on his approach can be found in our article about the trick for overcoming choice paralysis (in German). Incidentally, there's even a game on Steam dedicated to this very phenomenon.