So I love Skyrim. I also love mods. As a result I loathe/detest/hate/despise Steam more than I do even mosquitoes, and they svck.

Now I haven't played Skyrim for some time but a friend just bought Dragonborn for me and I decided to look into another play through. Unfortunately I only see two ways to protect my saves from Steam update [censored] my heavily modified game. I can either play offline (which isn't foolproof as Steam likes to randomly insist on making a connection to update itself, which usually entails throwing out all my preferences) or to duplicate the Skyrim directory and install it somewhere Steam can't get it's grubby lil mitts into my directory structure. So that's what I did. I copied the whole 13GB folder to the root directory.

Unfortunately, although NMM is fairly easy to work with, neither BOSS nor Wrye Bash recognize the second directory as the one to work on/from and I can't figure out how to tell them. So amidst considering how to counter such an absurd conspiracy against the sanctity of my saved games (which involved a mini-me and an orbital death ray) it occurs to me that surely someone has solved the problem of how to both extensively mod their game while simultaneously denying Steam the ability to wreak chaos and devastation on my several hundred hours of gameplay.

So I'm begging for help. At this point (I think) I just need to know how to tell BOSS and Wrye Bash which directory my game is in. But I don't know how. I'm a quick study and desperate to learn the ways of the world. Please help me before I do something rash...

Thanks so much