So I started the cleansing the stones quest for skyrim dlc dragonborne and I've cleansed all of the stones but the water stone so I used the bend will shout on it and the archways didn't break but the people walked away as if freed. Is there anything I can do to fix this apart from loading up a previous save before it ?

This is your best recourse. Note, this is not because you are on the console, this is how we fixed glitched quests on the PC too.

I always have a save slot from when I start a quest, maybe one for the middle, then one for when I finish it. That becomes the save slot to use to start the next quest and the pattern repeats. Quests don't glitch all the time, it is rare, but reloading a prior save is almost always successful at letting the quest happen. It just has to be a save from before you really did anything for that quest for the most success.

Well the thing is that I lost my disk a while back and before I lost it I started the quest and when I found it I forgot all about that quest until I looked at my quests so I got a lot of stuff and leveled up alot so I don't want to reload it and even if I did want to I probably couldn't because I can't remember which save file is the one before I started the quest