I had been playing a character yesterday, and did a save / exit for the day. Today I start up that character and go to load up my last save. It has the number 42949. I load that save, looks valid, so I do a save again. Now my last save is '000'. Great, I now know the highest number of save games before they wrap around...

Looking into my save game folder, the savegame 42949 does not appear. Going by timestamp, that corresponds to a 'Save -1 - blah', and the in-game number 000 corresponds to a 'Save 0 - newplace'.
If I recall the sequence of events from yesterday, I had crashed when exiting the glacial crevice area, so when I re-loaded and got back to that point, I did a quick save prior to exiting the glacial crevice. No issues exiting the crevice this time, so no need for the quicksave... Went up the hill, killed the frost giant, went on and finished out final few quests of dawnguard, went back to breezehome and saved.

So, now I have in-game numbering that does not match my real file names, and I have no idea how the in-game numbering will look when I do my next save - will it over-write 001? Or will I have two 001 files, with different names? Or possible the same name?

OK, loaded game and loaded up my 000 game, did a few things, saved. Now I have two 001 saves, different place-names. This could be confusing if I am in the same place I was when I had the first save and save again... File system has now has a 'Save - 1 - blah' as well as the usual 'Save 1 - oldplace' and a 'Save 1 newplace'. At least a difference in file name structure, as well as time-stamps. Now I am really confused. What if I now make another new save, what number - naming convention will it have? Well, it went back to the usual convention, being named 'Save 2 - newplace'. Still, in-game it is just '002 PlaceName'. The caption in the mouse-over shows timestamps, both in-game and filestamp times, so could sort this mess out that way, but still requires a bit of thinking now to load up a game.

So what happens if I go in and delete all files back to and including the quick save? I only get one chance at this, folks... Do I do the deletes via file system or in-game? OK, I'll cheat... I made a new folder, copied out the saves into new folder... Now I can try both methods.

Method 1 - delete saves from file system. Works fine, actually, went form old 014 to new 015 just as it should. File system good, 'Save 14 - place', 'Save 15 - place'. Everything back in sync, just a lot of catch-up game playing to do.

Method 2 - delete saves from in-game. That also worked pretty much as the file deletion method. going from 014 to 015 in-game, and from 'Save 14 - place' to 'Save 15 - place'. All good. Did not clean up the .bak files though...

End results? I now know the max file numbers, and what happens if reached. I also think that maybe the issue with holes in the numbering may have been fixed. Earlier, I had issues where if I deleted a series of saves and then started playing, (Say, I really didn't like how things went in a quest, decided to start over) the next save would be the next number as if I hadn't deleted anything, Say, from 003 to 007 in-game, and from 'Save 3' to 'Save 7' file system.

But you all knew that anyway...