Skyrim SE - load button greyed out

[bluemeanies5]

Hello - I've had a stable modded build of Skyrim SE (1.6.1130.0) running just fine for months. I use Vortex and I always start the game through Vortex. I don't use profiles in Vortex. I have Steam Cloud disabled.

Yesterday when I ran the game, the very first screen just shows "New", with the "Load" option greyed out. No "Continue" option as per usual, and clicking on the greyed out Load option unsurprisingly does nothing.

My savegames are all present & correct in the usual location (My Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Saves). I've not touched the mod state nor done anything in Vortex for ages. There's only one user account on my PC.

The only thing that has changed is that a family member added their Steam account to my Steam installation the day before, so that they could let me family share one of their games on my PC. Since then, I have had the behaviour above. I have logged them out of Steam on my PC and the behaviour is still as above. 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

[7531Leonidas]

Have you checked that the game didn't auto-update as part of the added account?  You can just right-click on your SkyrimSE.exe in your ...steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition folder, and look at the 'Details' tab when you check the file properties (if you don't want to load the game again and look at the version on the main menu).  Make sure that Vortex is still directed toward your Steam installation, and not some kind of generic 'all of the above' accounts to include the new addition.  I am just guessing, because I am the only one on my computer at all.

[bluemeanies5]

Problem solved. I was wrong in stating that all my savegames were still there - the .skse files were all present, but all the .ess files were missing. I am guessing that the 2nd steam user's Steam Cloud enabled status caused all my local saves to be zapped and uploaded to the cloud - I can't think of anything else that could have caused it. In any case, once I realised it was the complete absence of all .ess files in the samegame directory that was causing the problem, I restored from a backup and now all is well. I dare not activate Steam Cloud under my Steam account to test that theory - I will simply make sure I keep doing regular backups and I will be very wary of logging in any other Steam account on my PC in case it might have Steam Cloud enabled. If this is the cause, it's a pretty crap workflow design. I've never used Steam Cloud and so it didn't occur to me that a 2nd Steam account that did use Steam Cloud might (emphasise - might - I haven't tested this) screw all my local saves.

[7531Leonidas]

@bluemeanies5 FYI - I made a desktop shortcut to the savegame folder, and then placed a folder inside, naming it 'Save Locker'.  I then manually move all of my saves into it (except the last three) at the end of the gaming session.  I don't worry about autosaves.  Once there, I use 7zip to archive them, they generally compress quite well.  If I want to start a new game, I simply move the previous archive into its own character-named folder, and start over.

[AaronOfMpls]

While I move my saves into a .../Saves/old/<year number>/ subfolder, and symlink the most recent saves for each character back into the main folder (I'm on Linux).  In LE I've just left these as-is so far.  But in SE I've also been archiving my inactive characters' saves into .7z files and deleting the originals.  (And yes, they do compress pretty well!)

I also make daily backups (via an rsync command) to another drive before bed ... or sometimes in the morning if I was really tired and skipped it the previous night.