After 50 great hours of gameplay with my Dragonborn, I decided to try an evil elf character.

The damn elf was truly evil, and made me overwrite the quicksave of my Dragonborn (I thought, well I won't quicksave, but the constant conditioning of quicksaving made me do it without really thinking)

Then I noticed the save was gone, checked all file, GONE.

Right now i'm using a lost and deleted files inspector, but takes a lot of time. Will windows xp recovery be useful if the inspector isn't? Is there any other choice? some hidden backup saves folder?

I REALLY DON'T WANT TO LOSE ALL MY EFFORT


ALSO, BETHESDA, HOW HARD IS TO IMPLEMENT A CHARACTER SYSTEM? this kind of issues could be easily avoided if each character had its own set of saves

haha, svcks for you mate.

oh no you get to play skyrim all over again, how tragic

I feel you, I feel you.

ive heard this before, creating a new char might destroy the old saves.

Dont you save on like 10 save files and rotate them? I always do that incase of a gamebreaking glitch you can go back anywhere from a few hours to 15 mins of gameplay saves.

Please tell me you just dont save on your auto save

Not hard but a lot harder than opening up the console and typing in "savegame Ma'Sabi" (just remove the quotation marks and replace Ma'Sabi with the name of your character) and then saving over that save whenever you make a manual save.

Make a manual save after every play session. Or several. Don't rely on auto and quick saves.

I hadn't heard this - so it erased ALL your saves? By that I mean manual numbered saves - you don't just use quick/auto do you?

I initially thought you meant it erased the old quick save and there was no backup.

But ALL previous saves disappeared?

OMG - that is scary - I create new characters to try all the time.

J

It doesn't destroy saves. It can only "destroy" your saved games if you are too lazy to create a single manually saved file to save over every now and then. Really, it was the same with Morrowind and Oblivion and just about 99% of other games in the world.

What is so hard about saving when you leave the game ?

If you're on the PC and you want to use different character then you just have a save game folder for each one e.g. Char 1 Saves, Char 2 saves and then just swap the Save game folder in and out. But yeah Bethesda should have implemented a multiple character screen.

Your not the only one, happened to my warrior 20+ hours in.
There seems to be a bug when you start a game it automatically saves onto your files (randomly) during the "character selection" part.
In the future, if your deciding whether to make 2 or more characters,
start a new game and save it before you "make your character"
so when you decide to make another file.. say.. evil elf character, you just load that "pre-character selection" file.
this bug is rather annoying but there's nothing we can do but wait for a patch.

hope this makes sense. good luck

EDIT: oh and I got this bug in PS3

I just love how everyone is telling me what should I had to do, instead of helping me find what should I do to recover my save.

Yes, it was MY mistake, my laziness, I understand and learn from my errors, let's move on to something constructive now please.

If it is not there, there is likely no way to recover your save, barring a system recovery back to that point(if you were lucky enough to have had a sysrec saved at that point). Otherwise you might try restoring an older version of the file.

But most likely, you're out of luck. Just remember the others advice next time.

so wait you really ONLY had the autosave/quicksave data?

well either way you could still lose manual save data... I tested it after mine got erased (and I had about 4 manual saves before it got erased) all rewritten to the new save data.

I'm glad I'll never run into something like this, 20 hours so far and 187 saves coupled with a quick save every minute, obsessive I know. :nope:

i know theres a bug destroying saves, but this might be different.

recovery only restores settings not systems files I dont think it will help with that

see here: http://www.needtechsupport.com/content/7-system-restore-faq.html

"System restore is not a backup service. It will only restore system settings and system file. It will not restore old files that you have accidentally deleted."

I always make a new account when I feel like making a new Char. Sorry to hear this tho, svcks.

Well, unless you manually created a backup for your saves, like at a certain point you went to your Skyrim saves folder and then copy and pasted into another, I really see no way of recovering your older file, I've done something like this back in Oblivion, I accidentally saved over my main file with a new character, it svcks I know how you feel

that sux, you really should've back up the save.

You really didn't make a hard save of your previous character before starting a new one, and counted on the quicksave/autosave feature?

Wow.

First time playing an RPG?

Really, there isn't anything else you can do, and to fault everyone for pointing out the obvious...well...it's the obvious that you apparently missed. Sorry.

But it's still Skyrim. The possibilities are endless and all at your whim, no matter what character it is you start off with.

The adventure continues.

I always keep 3 manual saves per character. Always.

Try setting up manual saves instead of relying on the quicksaves, must be new to sophisticated gaming.