Deleting f4se files from Game Saves Folder. DON'T

[StormWolf01]

So for a while now, I'd been having some problems with Infinite Load screens. During the course of trying to fix that, I started cleaning out my Save Games folder, to see if that might help the problem.

Well... during the course of that, I got the (not so wise idea) of thinking.... "Hey, what are these f4se files here in my save folder?" "What if I delete them?"

 

Gave it a shot. Believe it or not, the load problem actually decreased and my load times got a couple of seconds faster.

I thought... "WHOOHOOO!" I'm back in business! And proceeded to start playing again.

 

Yeah no.

Shortly after, I found a very negative side effect to the gains that I had gotten, which tilted the scales back in favor of NOT doing this.

Those save files, it turns out are f4se saving records of everything that it's done during the course of that play session.

So, in short, the most obvious thing that I deleted? My character's Looksmenu body slide sliders records. They went bye-bye. Can we say... CBBE body with a VANILLA build? NO slider settings, whatsoever?

On ALL my characters. In ALL my saves. (Because I deleted ALL the corresponding f4se files out of the save game folder.)

 

So yeah. I know that this is something that we haven't talked about very recently. So I thought I would share the experience, and pass along the result.

If you're somebody that is very much attached to the bodyslide settings that you use for your character(s) this is one VERY sure way to make them disappear.

 

 

[Guest deleted34304850]

ouch. double ouch. triple ouch.

 

do you have any backups or any method to restore them? that's something i would have never considered - so thanks for sharing. i've made certain that i've got those guys in my backup.

[StormWolf01]

Heyas 1ae. Yeah. Some people really really get into the appearance of their characters, which is one of the reasons why I brought this up. And yeah, I totally agree, it's not something that we think about.

 

Fortunately... yes. I Do keep frequent backups. I'd actually made backups before trying this out. So all but one of my characters, is good. Natch, it's the one that I'm playing right now that windows went... "Nope" to during my saves.

 

But yeah, thanks for chiming in :)

 

Tho one thing I didn't post about before, cuz it slipped my mind... is recovery.

In a lot of cases, unless you tell the machine to outright delete the files, such as holding down the Shift key while pressing the delete key, they can be recovered from the recycle bin.

In the case of them NOT being sent to recycle bin, or having been cleaned out, by removing the contents of the recycle bin... there's recovery software that can try to pull the files back from the disk.

Recuva is a pretty good freebie for this. I've had to use it on occasion for retrieving files from my phone's micro SD card. There are plenty of other really good ones too. Just watch out for the ones that limit the number of files the freeware or shareware version will recover, or has a file size limitation. Tho not really a factor here, as most of these are small files.

[JimmyRJump]

One of the causes (my own observation and take-with-a-pinch-of-salt conclusion) is a map marker that isn't implemented properly so that the game is unable to find the place the map marker should be tied to. While the game is searching, no new data is loaded until the data is found. Since the data cannot be found the game stops loading and you have the so called infinite loadscreen. I had it with mods that add settlements and that had their map marker not implemented properly. This also results in a settlement not showing under its own name but under 'Commonwealth' in the pipboy workshop data list.

 

Another cause is that for some reason, the RAM doesn't get flushed properly and there's no room for new data to be loaded. You don't get an error for not enough memory since there's enough, it's just that the game stops loading until there's room in the RAM for the data. But since the RAM doesn't get flushed, you're stuck permanently.

[Guest deleted34304850]

Heyas 1ae. Yeah. Some people really really get into the appearance of their characters, which is one of the reasons why I brought this up. And yeah, I totally agree, it's not something that we think about.

 

Fortunately... yes. I Do keep frequent backups. I'd actually made backups before trying this out. So all but one of my characters, is good. Natch, it's the one that I'm playing right now that windows went... "Nope" to during my saves.

 

But yeah, thanks for chiming in :smile:

 

Tho one thing I didn't post about before, cuz it slipped my mind... is recovery.

In a lot of cases, unless you tell the machine to outright delete the files, such as holding down the Shift key while pressing the delete key, they can be recovered from the recycle bin.

In the case of them NOT being sent to recycle bin, or having been cleaned out, by removing the contents of the recycle bin... there's recovery software that can try to pull the files back from the disk.

Recuva is a pretty good freebie for this. I've had to use it on occasion for retrieving files from my phone's micro SD card. There are plenty of other really good ones too. Just watch out for the ones that limit the number of files the freeware or shareware version will recover, or has a file size limitation. Tho not really a factor here, as most of these are small files.

i love recova - i have that on a pendrive full of recovery tools for just that exact reason. good shout on that tool and i'm glad you could restore the files without too many issues.

on the vortex forums there have been so many instances where people have failed to make backups of their files and lost data - seemingly forever. i have recommended Macrium Reflect several times as they offer a free version of their product which is more than capable of backing up mod archives, config files and all the rest.

 

i appreciated your post above and the heads up about it and checked the backups that occurred overnight and all the F4SE files are there, so I'm happy about that. Thanks again.