About File Sizes of Saved Game Plays

[DirebearCoat]

I've read where people have told others to "go to a previous save game" to undo a lot of problems that have come up.  However, in my mind, all of those saves seem like it would take up a lot of hard drive (or SSD) space on your PC (or XBox, etc).

So, I "Save Over This Game," instead of creating a "New Save."  I realize that means that I can't go back to a particular spot to undo some mistake, but I want to save disk space.

Am I saving hard drive space by doing that, or am I just making one ginormous save file instead of a bunch of smaller save files and not really saving any space on my drive?

[7531Leonidas]

I don't think that you are creating a monster file, but here's what I do:

I make a shortcut to the game save folder on the desktop, and periodically move older saves to a folder (can be on a different drive).  You should at least keep the last five saves or so untouched, but move all older saves to the backup folder ( I usually title the folder w/the character's name).  After you are sure that you do not need any of the saves, you could delete 4 of every 5, or 9 of every 10, compact them with 7zip or similar, and still have a set of saves to help you recover a lengthy playthrough.  They could be moved to an external flash drive, if necessary, but I haven't had the best of luck WRT their reliability.

[Gunslinger808]

It really isn’t all that memory intensive to leave saved files for a week or two just to be sure you didn’t glitch your game.

Heck, when I was new to gaming I didn’t realize they were saved to my files, and I thought deleting them in game was all I needed to do, imagine my surprise when I finally looked and saw hundreds of saves from years ago.

My SSD drive is luckily large enough that it still has considerable space, even with TES, Cyberpunk, Fallout 3 and 4, Starfield, and all their mods and at least 7 other games on it  

I had to deactivate Cloud saves though, it kept reloading old deleted saves onto my drive every time I logged in. 

[scorrp10]

A typical save is only a few megabytes.   Considering current prices of ssd drives (like $250 for a 4TB), you really should not have to worry.  You can have several thousand saves, and they will still take up way less than 100Gb

[wfandrews]

Every time you write a file over another file there is the possibility of corrupting that file. The more times you overwrite it the greater chance of corrupting it,

I rarely keep more than ten save files, deleting the save files as I go. I never have understood the reasoning of keeping over ten or so save files. Are you really going to go back that far?

In the interest of full disclosure though I am one of those people who is constantly starting a new game so if I have to go back more than two or three hours I just start a new game. I also have the tendency of starting a new game if there is an update of one of the mods I consider essential to my game.

[scorrp10]

Well, for starters, I doubt any overwriting of the same file is actually taking place.    The game writes out a wholly new save file each time you save, complete with  new file name, actually.    But is you chose to overwrite, it will, at the end, delete the save game file you are 'overwriting'. 

However, saving a game is a process, and a complex one,  and depending on the state of the game at that time, something can go wrong with that process, and you end up with a corrupted save file.   And if that ends up being the last save you do before you quit the game, guess what happens when you want to load?    Personally, I NEVER overwrite save games, and I save often, and if I do end up with a corrupt save, I am about guaranteed to have a good save within 5-10 minutes of the corrupt one.   In some of my playthroughs, I can run up a save game count of well over 1000.    Skyrim is not one of those ancient games where you only had a small limited number of save 'slots', and hard drive space is dirt cheap.  Now, if you have too many saves, the game's load menu might start having fits - in which case, I might go into my save directory, and lets say if I an on a save 1059, I might move saves 900-1000 elsewhere and zip them up.

[wfandrews]

Does the game write out a whole new save file for every auto save, which are the saves I was referring to?

Also I was referring to the OP saying he was saving over an old save instead of creating a new save. In that case I believe my advice about overwriting files is relevant.

I do know the difference between a hard save and an auto-save.

[scorrp10]

Auto and quick saves are the devil, and are the MOST common sources of save corruption.    I would strongly recommend disabling them altogether, and just get in the habit of making manual saves often.

[AaronOfMpls]

On 10/19/2024 at 9:26 PM, DirebearCoat said:

I've read where people have told others to "go to a previous save game" to undo a lot of problems that have come up.  However, in my mind, all of those saves seem like it would take up a lot of hard drive (or SSD) space on your PC (or XBox, etc).

On 10/19/2024 at 11:44 PM, scorrp10 said:

A typical save is only a few megabytes.   Considering current prices of ssd drives (like $250 for a 4TB), you really should not have to worry.  You can have several thousand saves, and they will still take up way less than 100Gb

Indeed, my Oldrim/LE save folder is only about 37 GB, and my SE one is only a few hundred MB.  ...Plus a bit more for other save folders in some MO2 profiles.

Though in LE or SE, I don't keep everything in the top-level Saves folder.  Instead, I keep the most recent saves there, and archive the rest -- either in subfolders (LE) or compressed in .7z files (SE). 

On 10/19/2024 at 10:24 PM, Gunslinger808 said:

I had to deactivate Cloud saves though, it kept reloading old deleted saves onto my drive every time I logged in. 

Yah, I have cloud saves off too.

[AaronOfMpls]

5 hours ago, scorrp10 said:

Auto and quick saves are the devil, and are the MOST common sources of save corruption.    I would strongly recommend disabling them altogether, and just get in the habit of making manual saves often.

Yes, those can be a problem.  I gather that the save process isn't quite instantaneous enough sometimes if the game isn't paused -- either via the console or the Esc menu.