I am just wondering if I should make a new save everytime or just overwrite the one that I already have.I never overwrite my auto-saves but I have thought about overwriting my manual ones before.What do you all recommend??Does it really make any difference at all or is that just my second ego kicking in!!I think back when I was playing oblivion someone said that making a manual save everytime prevents a "CORRUPTED GAME SAVE FILE" but I just want someone elses opinion maybe someone who has more experience overwriting thier saves than me!!!Thanks any help is appreciated playing on the PS3 not that it matters as this issue would relate to any platform.

It is a good policy to make a new save instead of overwriting a current one. Some people have issues with overwrites and some don't so it is better to be safe than sorry.

My overwrites don't seem to actually overwrite anything. All of my saves are still there, for some reason.

Manually save, and don't overwrite. Turn off autosaves completely. I save quite a bit because of surprise lock-ups or crashes, and every once in a while I'll go to my save folder (My documents -> My games -> Skyrim -> Saves) and delete chunks of old saves.

Thanks everyone and susurruss I do the same thing dude.Does it help to delete older saves or is it kinda just like a point of preference or something like that?I heard it helps your hard drive but im not exactly sure.

You can archive your older saves by zipping them or moving them to a different folder.

I have hard saves archived and labelled just before the installation of any new mod.

Thanks WTflag!!!

I've been overwrighting saves since morrowind and never once had a problem,

Morrowind-xbox
Oblivion-xbox 360
Skyrim-ps3

That's not to say something won't happen, maybe I'm just lucky.

Got skyrim the first day it came out, only made one person so far, didn't make a new person for any of the patch's that came out, over 250 hours, all overwrite saves. Not a single so far

Turn off autosaves and never ever ever...
...ever...
overwrite saves, it's an absolutely perfect way to corrupt them.

I always turn off autosave, but I've manually overwritten previous saves lots and lots of times. Never had any problems either, aside from that one time when my father accidentally pulled out my power cord while I was saving ... I'm on pc, but I doubt that'll make much difference ...?

Save files can be overwritten, but the more times they are over written, the more of a chance of corruption. Granted, I have not seen the same number of posts in this game about corrupted saves, so they may have gotten better at, bloat not withstanding.

What I do is have a series of manual slots that I cycle through, I use 5, some use more. This way I can go back to various stages along the way if needed. Once a slot gets overwritten 5 to 10 times, I create a new slot.

I never use Autosaves as they cause more problems than they are worth. For one, the save is created at cell render, the worst time for that, second, they are constantly overwritten, they slow the game down, you can't avoid a dragon fight with save on travel etc etc etc.

I WAS overwriting old saves, but a couple of times it didn't overwrite it (PS3 BTW). Now I always save new, but before I load the game up each time, I go in and delete all but about the last five saves. Works for me.

I'm on Xbox, I always keep about 5/6 saves and the 3 auto saves, then just overwrite the saves I have. Played a good 150-250+ hours in total and haven't had any quest problems, very rarely have lag and experienced a small number of freezes (after a few hours of the Xbox being on).

So do people recommend I delete the previous saves then create a new one every time instead? I'm not going to store hundreds of saves which I'll never use, does anyone actually know definitively if overwriting saves increases the chance of file corruption?

I think you are best off going in and "cleaning up" your saves, which means deleting the old ones. Save new, and then keep as many of the new ones as you feel comfortable. The other thing I do is before starting a new character, I save the old one about three times, with the character's face on the screen so I can SEE who it is and don't accidentally delete it.

I have a shortcut on my desktop to the Saved Games folder.

In an average day, I can have around 110-120 saves. I manual save only, no overwrites.

On the next day I play, I access the saved games folder and delete all but the most recent four saves for that character and start anew.

The only problem is that you can have upward of 3000 deleted saved games in your recycle bin lol. But that's OK, if you need to go back further than four games, they're still there and only a click away from being added back to your folder. Still have to go in there and delete them every so often - but that's more of a weekly/monthly thing.

I tend to remove "intersaves" as it were, and just keep critical location/action-specific ones.
Once I have a fair number I then archive off a proportion to a zip file on an SSD drive - I ALWAYS keep a couple of saves from the start around and just after chargen.

@CCNA:

Hmm. I have autosaves enabled except the timed ones while in the menu. I rotate through about 10 save slots. I've been doing this for months on the Xbox. No problems to report, except one corrupt save after countless reloads.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but an overwrite is really no such thing. An "overwrite" typically goes like this: check to see if the file already exists; if it does, delete it; then write a brand-new file with the same same. Is this not how Skyrim does it?

I turned off autosaves because of the delay it causes when loading into areas. Don't need them anyway. Before Kinect I used to overwrite a single save and then periodically create a new save so I would have something to fall back on if the main one got corrupted at some point. I've never had an issue with any saves becoming corrupted with this game though. Now with the Kinect I do about the same except I use Quick Save most of the time and then whenever I'm about to quit playing or get through a difficult area I'll create New Save to have a point to back up to just in case. It's always good to have a few back up points. Eventually when I get too many save files I'll go back and delete some of them.

On the PC, you can use the console to make named saves. The command is save - e.g. save Sus54 (lets me know which character and what level she was at at the time of save).

The save file is a huge database. Most of them are 12Mb in size on a higher level character. This database only gets created new when a new slot is created. Otherwise, only the values that have changed in the array are changed in the database. It is when not all arrays get updated properly that the corruptions can come in.

Again, this game is better at not corrupting save files than previous titles. Now, it is mostly mod issues that cause save issues.

Ah, thank you. I guess what I'll do then is start to create new slots and delete the oldest ones I already have, one at a time. Sounds like a plan . . .

After reading all this, I think my current method is safe, and very easy to keep on top of.

For anyone who cares, this is how I do it.

Start Skyrim, load up my save, during the entire play I rely upon quicksaves (in case of CTD, although I usually CTD more often when I forget to save, go figure), at the end of my play, I go and delete the save I loaded from, then save into a new slot, then exit the game, so next time I click "continue" it loads up that save.

beth have told (the ps3 comm at least) overwriting saves was a contributing factor to instability.

the trouble ofc on console is that its much more arduous to go through and clean up your save files if you're constantly creating new ones. Nevertheless I try to keep ten saves for my active char, about 6 are static backups and during the current play session I will create a new save and keep overwriting that except when I come to a major branch point, at which time I will either overwrite an relatively clean save or just make a new manual save.

I leave all autosaves on now because since 1.5 this game is too unreliable and the save menu takes too long to enter/exit every 15 minutes.

It is much easier to deal with tons of saves on the PC using Windows Explorer. But, then again, you only need to delete the excess saves once in a while. Since the most current saves are at the top of the list, the ones lower down can be ignored in game until room is needed. I am not sure at what number of save slot count the list becomes slow to load, but I think you can have hundreds in the list.

Why can't bethesda just say overwrite or don't overwrite.I always manual save except at the beginning of the game.When you are forced to autosave but then after that.I always cut them off straight afterwords.The only auto-save that I do actually have on is the character menu auto-save and that only saves once every 30 minutes or so instead of everytime you enter a freaking building or travel somewhere on your map because believe it or not I do die from time to time lol XD.I think I got this weird deppression like mentality after fallout:new vegas that if I saved while in a fight it might corrupt my save or possibly crash my game and I think alot of it is to blame on the PS3 community because of all the gossip about the save file size being the reason that everything went to crap in the game but we all know now.That that wasn't the reason so yea i got save file size deppression XD.I think I need treatment does anyone have a cure??lol