Steam Deck & Handhelds

SaveVault’s interface is designed for handhelds and is built to Valve’s Deck Verified checklist.

What that means

• Gamepad navigation — D-pad, A/B, and bumpers move through the sidebar and controls, with focus-visible indicators showing where you are.
• On-screen keyboard — text fields summon the Deck’s keyboard via the VirtualKeyboard API.
• Suspend/resume — the app handles the Deck sleeping and waking mid-session.
• Touch-friendly — 44px tap targets and a layout tuned for 1280×800, with adaptive breakpoints for any screen size.

Tip

If the controller does nothing in Game Mode, Steam may have applied its keyboard-and-mouse template instead of a gamepad layout. Open the controller settings and choose the Gamepad template (controller icon → Templates → Gamepad).

Protection in Game Mode

The GUI’s Live Protection watcher only runs while the app is open, which it usually isn’t in Game Mode. The launch wrapper covers that: add it to a game’s Properties → Launch Options and every session gets a post-exit backup, an optional pre-launch restore and cloud pull, and the controller-chord checkpoint (L3+R3 by default) working natively from inside the game’s launch container.

savevault-wrap -- %command%

You don’t need --gui: savevault-wrap has no console, so it always shows native dialogs instead of terminal prompts.

If SaveVault is installed through Steam, the wrapper is at ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/SaveVault/x86_64/usr/bin/savevault-wrap on the Deck and desktop Linux, or .../SaveVault/aarch64/usr/bin/savevault-wrap on the Steam Frame.

On a Windows handheld, use savevault-wrap.exe from SaveVault’s install folder. For a Steam-installed copy that is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\SaveVault\savevault-wrap.exe" -- %command%; see the launch wrapper recipes.

Steam Frame

SaveVault runs natively on the Steam Frame’s arm64 hardware, however you bought it. The Steam edition installs the right build automatically. For Direct and GitHub builds, use SaveVault_<version>_aarch64.AppImage in Desktop Mode; it updates in-app like any AppImage.

Quest ports on the Frame run as Android builds inside Steam’s Android container rather than through Proton, so their saves have no Proton prefix to look in. SaveVault probes the container for Unity games and stores what it finds under the same AppData\LocalLow\<Company>\<Product> path a PC backup records, so a save backed up on the Frame restores on a PC — and a PC backup restores into the Frame’s container — with no remapping. The device shows up as Steam Frame in backups it makes, and the Restore page’s Start from chips include the container folder.

Steam edition notes

• Properties may show a Steam Cloud entry, but SaveVault never syncs saves through Steam Cloud; see why.
• A subscribed Workshop theme or translation may not download while SaveVault is running via Steam; see the workaround.

Saves in Proton/Wine prefixes

Many Deck games run under Proton, so their saves live inside a compatibility prefix. SaveVault discovers and resolves Wine prefix roots, and can materialize saves back into a prefix on restore with --redirect-wine (or by default with Settings → Game Scanning → Redirect Wine saves).

Tip

Pair the Deck with cloud backup so saves follow you between the Deck and your desktop — the launch wrapper pulls before you play and pushes after.