As someone who has had VR since the Vive came out in 2016, don’t.

The Deck is nowhere near powerful enough for PC VR.

Go to desktop mode and set the screen to timeout. The Deck will even sleep when it finishes.

I will be doing the same. While it’s out I plan to pull a backup of it just in case.

The drives can just be imaged with Clonezilla.

I haven’t seen a picture with just the back off (no disassembly) so it’s hard to say. It does appear one ribbon goes over the motherboard now instead of under, but it is difficult to be sure without everything else in place.

Even if so, the shield should just slide out from it without disturbing. Hopefully it still goes under the MB like the LCD model and the images are just deceiving with everything removed.

Similar to the LCD. The drive is in a slightly different location and it now requires a Torx screw driver to remove the back.

If you have an external drive of some kind that is big enough, you could use Clonezilla to write it to an image and restore that image file into the new Deck (assuming it’s at least the same size). You could also do a direct drive copy if you have an m.2 enclosure and pull one of the drives out.

The Deck doesn’t support Qualcomm QuickCharge. It uses USB-PD.