So, I have 2 characters and upwards of 300 or so saves....will it affect my game at all if a go in to the save game folder and delete say several hundred? I see no point in having all those old saves, unless of course I need them. Also, will this help the game performance any?

Secondly, and maybe related to too many saves...I just started getting random drops to the desktop after 240 plus hrs. Never had any before at all. The game doesnt really crash, it is still running in the back ground, and i can bring it bck up. Not sure why this started happening, too many saves maybe? ( ok , grasping at straws a bit here, lol ).

Of course you can delete your saves but I disable autosaving so I don't build up a ton of saves.

Have you installed anything recently?

If the game is still running and you can alt tab back to it or choose it from the task bar, then this is a background app that is throwing itself to the fore and displacing the game. Google Clean Boot and your OS to see if a Clean Boot stops this from happening. If it does, then find the offending app and do something about it.

Erm. Autosave only uses 6 files including backups!

I'll give this a try. I have not installed anything new recently...no malware or virus's either.

Also, how do you disable auto saves?

Why would you disable autosaves? It doesn't benefit you in any way what-so-ever by doing so. Just leave them on knowing that you have the added security in case something bad happens.

I just thought maybe so many saves after 200 plus hours of playing was cluttering things up.

They're not but if you would feel better then just do what I do...make a copy of your save folder into a backup location, rename it to todays date, delete all but 5 manual saves from your actual save folder, and leave the auto saves alone. This will give you a backup of all your saves and only leave your save folder with just 5 saves plus autos. But seriously, even with 1000 saves you'll still be taking up a very small amount of space and none of that matters to the game anyways. Unless you're running out of room on your hard drive of course. Otherwise they are just like any other file on your system...Skyrim won't care about them unless it needs them and will only use what it needs while completely ignoring the rest.

The saves aren't your problem, like has already been mentioned, the problem is with a background app.

Disabling autosave also decreases load time a lot as well when you go into places. I just save manually.

What I meant to say was that I avoid using new saves and just overwrite old ones, which saves on space because of the bloated file size of the saves.

Disabling autosave does decrease load time but it's not such a big deal in skyrim which seems to stream much better than fo3/oblivion.

If memory serves, autosave created problems in Oblivion.

What exactly is the problem with the background app? Perhaps I can disable the background app (unless of course it is Steam itself).

For One in this case he mentions getting crashes now that he has reached further into the game and this is when autosave is saving more information with each save and the amount of time those saves are taking can cause the game to CTD when it tries to load new cell info at the same time it is writing to the HDD so disabling autosaves might help with the problem as well -- besides the fact that as saves get bigger and the game is loading and saving at the same time also tends to lead to corrupt saves eventually -- which is why most long term players will tell you to disable the autosave and make your own saves manually when the game is idle instead of when it is trying to transition from cell to cell etc. !

I just can't imagine three files at roughly 20mb are going to cause issues. Possibly in the situation described above where there might be a save / load issue but personally I haven't seen such an issue in any game let alone in 300+ hours of Skyrim. Also note that he's not crashing to desktop...he's being minimized by something running in the background. It's not his saves or the auto save feature that is causing his issues. As far as load times, with a 64 bit operating system and 4 gigs of ram (don't really know what he has but that's about average these days) I just can't imagine having an additional three auto save files there or not as being that big of a deal. What are we talking about here? Half a second? With over 200 saves, including auto, I can get by load screens quicker than I can focus on the tips that they display.

But hey, I'm just saying...it's not like we've ever seen someone come around here posting for help only to find out that they haven't manually saved in over 20+ hours and don't have any autosaves to fall back on. Never happens.

I get this when Apple launches its updater.

Your argument about a 20 Mb file not being able to cause problems in a modern system is not as strong as you think. By that logic Oblivion should run like a charm in any modern computer on ultra, but that's not the case, because those things are never as simple as one should assume.

Having autosaves on cell transitions does cause CTDs and save corruption, which defeats the purpose of using them as security system, as they cause the problem they are intended to fix and when used to fix it you get a corrupt save. It's better to lost 20 hours of play for not loading than getting a corrupted save and using an airbag that increase the chances of having a car crash didn't looks like a good idea to me.

Try telling that to poor console owners. Sometimes it's two to three seconds loading time for me on my SSD.

To each their own I suppose. I personally use manual and auto when saving without any problems what-so-ever. I guess YMMV.

Either way, the autosaves are not his issue so lets just agree to disagree and let the thread get back on topic.

Disabling AUTOSAVE gets rid of exactly FOUR files.....(actually, the four files are likely there, just not updated since you disabled AUTOSAVE). AUTOSAVES save over themselves and only keep the 4 newest AUTOSAVEs. There are various rumors and untested theories that AUTOSAVE files can screw up your game, but they have saved my [censored] lots of backtrakcing numerous times.

EDIT: Really? Ar$e is censored?

Thanks for all the posts guys . Interesting ideas...thats why I love you guys / this place
I have over 300 manual saves. I have not turned off auto saves and probably will not. ( I had read a few places here that they could cause problems... As the poster above said...I load so fast that I cant even read the message tip during loading times all the way before I am loaded and playing. I have a quad core i5 750 on a p7p55d mobo with 4 gb .

I still am in the "process" of figuring out what the hell is making me drop to desk...last night I was dropping every 3-4 minutes. Nothing has changed on my system in months. I am actually wondering if it is Steam that is doing it...I'll find out thru process of eliminatiion eventually . I have checked system during several of these "crashes" and nothing else is running. Maybe I will turn off AVG AV tonight...though it has never been a problem before

And thanks again for keeping up on my thread Off to try the new patch.

Update: Thanks to this post and some fiddling around my firewalls I figured this out. Thought I should post it in case anyone else has had the same dropping to desk as I did.



I am running Win 7 firewall, also AVG AV ...I found that AVG kept disabling my Win Firewall , while using it's own firewall. Problem with that is AVG logs an alert something like 10-11 times a day ( at least) . I found out it was dropping to desk everytime "Akami Net Sessions" , accessed to internet and AVG would try to block it. Weird. I disabled Akami and set it to ask me when it needs to be enabled to update whatever it wants to update. ( usually Adobe or if you check it out...this program talks to the net to update all sorts of programs) Though this never posed any problem ever before....maybe it can be exploited or hacked?

I was then down to just 1, maybe 2 desk crashes during 1-2 plus hour playtime...and usually just right at the start. I figured out that every time i started my system up fresh, AVG AV would disable windows firewall again on a fresh boot. I finally just disabled AVG 's firewall, and enabled Win 7 firewall. Everything works perfect.
Two thoughts though, First,I have to deal with AVG annoyingly telling me that my system is unprotected because the FW is disabled. ( You would think it could notice that the Win 7 FW is on). And second, was my Akami Net Sessions hacked or something? Because I played the game from release until the last week of Jan before experiencing these desktop crashes. Over 200 hours of game play.

Thanks again to the all your answers and to the above Mod for leading in the right direction

I put a short cut on my desktop to the Skyrim saves. My saves are located at Admin>My Documents>My Games>Skyrim>Saves. I createad a new folder and named it > Saves_"name of the toone"_BckUp. My current toone is named Petty. So the new back up file is Saves_Petty_BckUp

Now and then i'l open the "Saves" file and (right click) cut most of the old game saves and (right click) paste them into the new "Saves_Petty_BckUp" file.

ATM I'm on my third Toone. The file size on my old past saves file run 2.5 to 3.5 gig. At some point I'l go back and selectively delet some of the old saves to free up hard drive space.

I guess the thread title change would help here..lol. I orig thought too many save games were causing a crashing problem...if you read up...you will see save ganes were not the issue