In January of this year, I picked up Skyrim, and loved it. I poured hours into it, delicately perfecting my High Elf into a skilled level 60 mage. However, one day, I started the game up and was shocked to see all my save files for this character had been mysteriously deleted! I only had two saves per character, maybe that was why, but when I checked online apparently this could happen if you leave the disc in without installing the game and play another game ( a downloaded one ) this may happen. I promptly installed the game, and recreated my character. I was less successful this time ( around level 30 ) when I booted the game up, and was greeted with the news that patch 1.5 was available. It installed, and, when I checked my save file, it had happened AGAIN!!! I still only had 2 saves per character, but, bizarrely, all the other characters remained intact for the second time.

My question is: is there any way to recover either of these characters, or are they lost forever?

Have you checked your game folder? Unless they are corrupted there should be much of a reason why they would just vanish without a player input, possible someone in the house hold cleared the saves at all?

No, I checked the files, and no-one in my house know how to turn an Xbox on, let alone wipe saves

how old is the system, is this the only games where files have disappeared?

It's a Slim from 2010, and no other saves from other games have been deleted to my knowledge.

Think i hear someone report a similar issue awhile ago dunno if thats related or not.

Its going to be one of 2 things:

1) Game bug
2) Hard drive sector corruption

Unfortunately once it no longer shows in your game folder, there is no recovery from that from what I am aware of.

I had the same problems. I saved my games on a memory stick when it was said to play from a memory stick at the time. First game saves would disapear then the installed game would disapear.

Now that things have been patched up after 1.4, saved to HDD and never had this problem before. My point is, is this with the current version you been playing? Also did you play with an older version and then patched it up?

Maybe delete everything, then reinstall fresh to the current patch. I know this will not help you recover your old saves, but maybe yoiu will not have this problem again starting a new game with the current patch leve.

Thanks for the advice.

Man I had the same issue. I bought my Xbox last Christmas just to play Skyrim, and logged in one day and all my files were completely gone. I started a thread on here about it.... totally devastated! I made a new character and levelled it up to 50 but I just lost the steam to do it. I am too busy with uni and work to justify putting the time in again... it ruined it for me, in an indirect way. I don't trust the game at all any more after realising that we don't even really understand the magnitude of these bugs. I presume it was a Skyrim bug seeing as the disc isn't in the drive, it had been fully installed and running off the HDD for months, and my partner's game files on his login were untouched. Mine just vanished into thin air.

PS There was also another thread a few months ago (similar time to when I posted) in which the same thing happened. The header for the thread was called "crushed and devistated" (sic) or something like that.

I highly recommend daily backups of the autosaves + the newest 1 or 2 manual saves. USB memory sticks are fairly cheap, and well worth the investment.

I've never even heard of this problem. No major issues here on that front, so far.