Can quicksaves corrupt your savefile?

[ZarahNeander]

Autosaves certainly can, what about quicksaves? I checked with resaver, nothing, but that's hardly a proof.

Thanks

[ShelLuser]

Autosaves can't corrupt your savefile as far as I know because they're kept separate from your manual saves. The same applies to quicksaves.

[rallicknom]

Actually any save can become corrupted. I just disable all auto saves and use quicksave judicially and delete it every time I quit the game. Working on the principal that the more times I save in a game session the more chances that a save will become corrupt. If you have autosave enabled you really wind up with a lot of saves so I do not enable it.

[ShelLuser]

"Corrupted save" is also a bit vague. Because usually your save isn't corrupt at all but messing around with mods can make the system pick it up as being corrupted.

Solution is simple: don't mess with your mod collection during gameplay. I've had several "corrupted" saves work perfectly on me again once I re-added the mods I used before.

[Grumpy]

autosaves, quick saves and normal saves are all saved in the same manner which means that every method is to the same degree prone to corruption

[Grumpy]

Originally posted by rallicknom:

Working on the principal that the more times I save in a game session the more chances that a save will become corrupt.

I have a similar principle, the more I leave the house the more chances I get to interact with other people :O

[Space Fart]

Originally posted by ShelLuser:

"Corrupted save" is also a bit vague. Because usually your save isn't corrupt at all but messing around with mods can make the system pick it up as being corrupted.

Solution is simple: don't mess with your mod collection during gameplay. I've had several "corrupted" saves work perfectly on me again once I re-added the mods I used before.

That can sometimes be solved without re adding the mods. Try save cleaners and follow instructions on the mod's description because there usually is one for uninstalling, especially if the mod can cause issues if uninstalled mid game.

Grumpy I dunno how correct this is but I think it's the game itself that becomes corrupt while creating the save file, therefore every save can become corrupt. And by game itself I mean the playthrough related stuff. Seeing how for example 10 saves will be saved perfectly fine but then the 11th save will get corrupt and starting from the 11th most likely every other will remain corrupt.

That said, as far as I know the amount of saves has nothing to do with how fast your saves will corrupt. So far I have over 150 saves this playthrough started with 230 mods and went up to 248 mid playthrough and I have autosaves enabled, but I delete all my not needed saves so usually I got 4 hardsaves and 3 autosaves in the folder to reduce loading times and what not. It's all about what happens in the game and what your mods do. I have also removed about a dozen mods throughout the playthrough.

In case you get a corrupt save as far as I know the best approach is to find the closest working save, open it in save cleaner and then continue and see if it stays fine. Unless you fell like you wanna do a new playthrough. It's pretty important to read mod comments before downloading a mod for this very reason, usually the users will catch on to a problem so you don't have to go through the same ordeal.

Also saves can become corrupt just by playing vanilla skyrim, but I have no idea how that happens.

[ZarahNeander]

Originally posted by ShelLuser:

"Corrupted save" is also a bit vague. Because usually your save isn't corrupt at all but messing around with mods can make the system pick it up as being corrupted.

Thanks for the input everyone. I'm rather cautious with adding/removing mods (clone the profile etc) during a run, I am however pretty sure that saving during area transitions is...dangerous

[Space Fart]

Originally posted by ZarahNeander:

Originally posted by ShelLuser:

"Corrupted save" is also a bit vague. Because usually your save isn't corrupt at all but messing around with mods can make the system pick it up as being corrupted.

Thanks for the input everyone. I'm rather cautious with adding/removing mods (clone the profile etc) during a run, I am however pretty sure that saving during area transitions is...dangerous

I wouldn't be so sure about saving during area transition being dangerous. It's usually the hard saves that have been getting corrupt for me.

[Space Fart]

Originally posted by grimus:

Auto and quick saves overwrite their previous files and thus have a greater chance of some data not saving correctly. Manual (hard, numbered) saves create a new file. So every once in awhile (maybe every 100-200 overwrites) you should do some "house keeping" and manually delete the auto and quick saves, forcing the game to create new auto and quick save files. I learned this trick while playing Morrowind and FO3 as they were well known to screw up their auto and quick saves often.

No reason not to use auto and quick saves just don't rely on them solely. And if you start and end each gaming session with a hard save and something goes wrong with the others then you have lost only a few hours of game play.

Don't overwrite a hard save with another hard save, for the same reasons as the auto and quick saves.

Nice, I didn't think of that. I should totally do that. I'm probably nearing 5000 autosaves in a row hahaha

[Grumpy]

Originally posted by grimus:

Auto and quick saves overwrite their previous files and thus have a greater chance of some data not saving correctly. Manual (hard, numbered) saves create a new file. So every once in awhile (maybe every 100-200 overwrites) you should do some "house keeping" and manually delete the auto and quick saves, forcing the game to create new auto and quick save files. I learned this trick while playing Morrowind and FO3 as they were well known to screw up their auto and quick saves often.

No reason not to use auto and quick saves just don't rely on them solely. And if you start and end each gaming session with a hard save and something goes wrong with the others then you have lost only a few hours of game play.

Don't overwrite a hard save with another hard save, for the same reasons as the auto and quick saves.

the problem with all these theories is, that they hardly backed up by facts just rumors. and everyone tells the story slightly different. so people should take these theories with a grain of salt.

[ZarahNeander]

Originally posted by grimus:

Auto and quick saves overwrite their previous files and thus have a greater chance of some data not saving correctly.

In the Oldrim days I ran a tracer on skyrim.exe and it turned out, skyrim always uses FileCreateFile so wiping the file out, This was true for manual, auto and quicksaves, hence I'm sceptical about overwrite theories.
SKSE however does not, it opens the file and starts poking around in it.

Just saying...

[Space Fart]

Yeah but it's still just a theory, albeit from a lot of observation I still can't say it with certainty that that is exactly the case. Besides what you and ZarahNeander wrote about the new file/old file create/write all that, it makes sense too.

If we combine those 2 things to be considered true then we can sum up the ways to avoid corrupt files are the following:

1. Hard saves, don't overwrite
2. Periodically delete autosaves and quicksaves manually
3. Be careful when adding and removing mods mid playthrough if you absolutely must, usually the issue is with mods that run scripts and other stuff in the background, not armor mods for example.

Further I would add that by my theory a player has no idea if a save is corrupted or not until they actually try loading it. So, if it's correct then you should keep at least one save from yesterday at the end of the day. Imagine you load yesterday's save, then after a while you make a save and it's corrupt, then all the other saves continue being corrupt it would mean that you got no saves. Meanwhile if you keep like 4 hard saves and you delete all of yesterday's saves it's bye bye character if save cleaner can't fix it for you.

As far as I can tell there isn't much else you can do, unless you wanna limit yourself to not use autosaves at all which is very annoying at least when you start. Besides if an autosave gets corrupt by the read/write theory then it probably shouldn't have anything to do with the hard saves becoming corrupt.

Edit: Also, a save getting corrupt doesn't mean that it's because a mod you added just now. The problem can be there in the mod itself but it may be an inactive script or something in the background. So it will corrupt the save once it's activated, leaving you no idea about which mod it actually is if you got a good number of mods. I think it may be possible to tell which script from which mod it is, if you got the knowledge of how to work the save cleaner further than clicking the auto clean buttons, but I have never tried so I can't be sure.

[The Major Gear]

Another thread explains that regular saves
pause scripts for the save. They also restart them when the you load them .


Quick saves take a snapshot of the scripts while they are running, not waiting for them to pause . That is one reason that they are more likely to get corrupted .

Also number of scripts you are running is also a factor.

[eyeC]

Quicksaves and Autosaves will not corrupt your saves any more than a "hard" save will. It's a myth that's been around for years, backed up by absolutely no evidence. You might as well say Obama corrupted your save.

[DPMR]

Ya, I go with Boomer on this one.

I’ve played 5800 hrs. between Oldrum and SE.
All the how the game saves is BS, just myths.

The same kind of myths that save cleaners work, save cleaners don’t have the ability to clean the areas of concern. Just a gimmick to get you to uses them, it all BS folks.

Mod your game with care and watch out for questionable console commands.

I have never had a corrupt save ever, auto, manual or overwrite.