Saving our Saves, Do you save your saves? Options

[Renee]

I was reading an old forum post Acadian made in the old Beth forums and was rather surprised to learn that Acadian deleted all his old "Acadian" paladin saves once Buffy was created. What a shocker (for me)! Acadian, I was going to message you directly about this, but then I wondered about the entire community.

Who saves their saves? If you delete them, why?

I know Lopov also used to delete all his character saves once his latest character stories were told. Over time I've Persuaded him to keep them around. PhonAntiPhon also once said he used to get rid of everything once a character story was done: saves, photos, tear the game's mods down, everything!

Because for me, if I got rid of all those old saves it would be almost akin to throwing away old photo books full of snapshots we all used to take with real cameras. I'd feel like something was missing. Even if I never return to those characters again. I like having all my old character saves, organized and structured into a variety of folders.

Maybe in the olden days when computers barely had any storage space it might be a good idea to toss those saves. Otherwise, for those who get rid of them, why do you do this?

[SubRosa]

I save almost all of my old saves. The only time I delete them is when I decide to restart a character because I got something wrong. I did that with my current run of January in Morrowind. After a few days I found that I was leveling up way too fast. I had forgotten that with the older Beth games you have to play games with your Major (and in Morrowind's case Minor) skills to control your leveling. So I started completely over, and deleted my old saves of her.

But otherwise, I keep everything. I still have my first save from Oblivion. To keep the in game menus from becoming overloaded, I create subfolders in each game's save folder, and copy all but the final save of every character there. That way I can pick up their game any time I want. Or just go back and sightsee for a little bit, and see things what their level was, what gear they had, etc...

I do this even though like Acadian, I rarely pick up and start playing from an old save. I usually just start a new game, since like he said, I cannot remember everything they did. But like Renee intimated, to me those savegames are like old family pictures. Even if I do not look at them often, I like knowing I have them there in the dusty attic of my hard drives.