I'm with you on this post and your previous in this thread.

What would be great though is that when saving, or more importantly, loading, we had a better way to sift through our characters! I mean, the current load menu is a mess with all character saves in one long list. A simple sort function would be great, maybe a drop down menu where you pick your character then only saves for that character are shown could be implemented by Beth. I have 550+ saves so far with only three characters at the moment and this is bad enough to sort. I can imagine that some folk have a real headache sorting / selecting the character to play if they have say ten or more characters.

Maybe there is already a way to sort the loading or a mod out there that works well to do this - I do not know. I'm sure though that someone could write some sort of app that interogates the save game folder then sorts saves and launches the game with the selected save! Or, maybe not!

Any way, OP, you should really make your own saves rather than depend on quick save* or auto save.






*On a way out tangent, there used to be a supermarket down the road from my house called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwik_Save!

OP...it's your fault - bottom line. However, I will try to help.

Download and install 'PhotoRec' - http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Have a secondary hard drive in the computer and have photorec scan the whole primary hard drive for files it can recover. Recover them to a folder on the secondary hard drive. With any luck, you'll recover one or more of the deleted saves. BE CAREFUL when using photorec. Never recover 'to' the drive you are trying to recover from. It first asks for the source drive. Then it opens up the folder where the program is and asks for the destination. You'll need to arrow back to select the secondary drive and folder you want as your destination. The recovery will take time, 2-6 hours depending on the size of the drive. The file and folder names will be generated (you'll need to rename the file). Also, recovered files can still be incomplete or damaged. The only way to know for sure would be to load up an .ess file and play it for a while.

Good luck!

All games have a chance to get corrupted save files.. you always save regually

I miss the day when you could name your saves. It made a HUGE difference in ease of locating save dates.

^ This....My fresh character with save number 1078....

Im playing on master difficulty since level 1, without overpowered abilities like enchanting,conjuration and smithing - so i have 2 use manual save really often. Cas in some situations like 8 vs 1 i die 10 times in a row before i will learn how to kill them.

And always making backup copyes of my saves on both HDD and internet.

just rename the save in the save folder then?

1. You really should have done a hard save for your mage. Just to make sure.

2. Not making auto-saves character specific is a terrible design flaw in the game, that I also am surprised anyone at Bethesda thought was ok.

3. Since this is in the PC section, just go to your terminal (via the ~ button), and type Save Mage or Save Dovah or whatever you want to name it. Instant named save.

I can't think of a single game that uses multiple auto save or quick save slots tied to separate characters. Not a single one.

It used to be standard in RPG's to make multiple saves. The Fallout manual encouraged you to save everytime you enter a new town, so if you mess up a quest, or don't like the outcome, you can go back and do it again.

I have about 8 saves, and always save at regular inervals. You always save over the oldest game. I have had a couple of corrupted quick saves in the 160+ hours I have been playing

It svcks you had to learn the hard way. I guess if you are new to RPG's, or the buggy nature of Bethesda's wonderful games you might not realise this. You won't get too much sympathy here (as you can see lol) as most people have been doing this for years!

Morrowind
Oblivion
Fallout 3
New Vegas
Skyrim

I think most quick save and auto saves work like this. I am struggling to think of one RPG that has multiple quick saves for different characters, but cant really think of any.

And If Butthustla has ever played a Black Isle game I will eat my hamster

Only ones I can think of are ME and ME2, DA:O and DA2.

All my characters are in their own save folders. Problem solved.

Each character should have there own save "trees."

In a round about way this happened to me with my first character when a friend played and overwrote my latest game save with hers accidentally.

Games 10+ years ago had individual save trees for each character. Why this game from 2011 doesn't get that concept is beyond me.

God God, dude! Always do a friggen manual save! This is always helpful to do when you are about to make some big change in your game, whether it's starting a new game or adding mods. That way you are always able to go back to a previous save. Also, the Autosave is not always perfect. If something happens while the game is saving... system crash, power outage, etc. your 1 save can be screwed up if that's your only one!

Along with that tip, to avoid save folder getting huge, just go through and delete some of your old save files, only keeping ones that you might ever want to go back to for some reason. Also, don't do like some people and accidentally delete your most recent save, too.

Also, if you play on PC, I think Skyrim automatically creates a backup of Autosaves that were deleted... I'm not sure when it creates these backup files, but I've helped someone recover a deleted save before because of this feature.

I have never in the history of rpgs trusted any autosave feature when there is an option to manually save.

To the OP:

1) Go inside your saves folder and back them all up (copy them wherever you want).

2) Now, back to the saves folder, apart from whatever saves you've made, you'll find 3 autosaves, 1 quicksave AND:

autosave1.ess.bak (take note of the .bak extension) autosave2.ess.bak, autosave3.ess.bak & quicksave.ess.bak.

3) Take out the .bak extension and load them up, just in case your 70 hours are still there. Before doing this though, you backed up your saves folder, did you?

4) Next time, make individual saves...

Dude. It's a well known fact that ONLY ONE quicksave file is ever kept on your HDD at one time. You should always make hard saves at the end of every playing session to avoid overwrites. This is just common sense, it applies to all kinds of software.

Sorry for your loss and all but this is completely your fault.

OMG i just wasted 5min of my life reading this absurd rant lol

This is why my back-up save file is around 3gig lol with 3000+ saves xD

Anyway to the OP: if you haven't played that much into ur new game where it overwrote all ur previous autosaves try going into ur save folder and see if you can salvage one of ur old autosave.ess.bak files, maybe, just maybe you can get the 70+ hrs of ur life back..

A really rather silly mistake. I learned a long time ago never to rely on quick saves or autosaves, in fact I don`t use them at all, (AUTOSAVE ON SLEEP ONLY) always making a proper hard save.

In fact if I was in charge of making Skyrim, I would not even allow a Quick Save option to prevent people like the OP making such dumb mistakes.

Why on earth would anyone use only quick saves......... it is unfathomable.

So, butthustla... did you get that? I had mentioned it backs up saves and this guy just outlined how you can recover your 70+ save file... if the bak file wasn't overwritten yet...

OT - Every time I saw your name I kept reading it as "butthurtsia". Not trolling you or anything, I really read it like that for some reason. I know, it's probably dyslexia on my part or I need reading glasses or something, but I found that amusing.

Anyway, good luck, and I hope you either recover your old save or enjoy your new character!

I feel your pain ... but Bethesda does give you a way of protecting yourself.

I had a corrupt save game with assassins creed where you had no possibility of easy previous saves.