Is there a way to mass delete saves in Skyrim?

As an avid Skyrim player with over 800 hours under my belt, one of the most common questions I see is how to delete saves quickly and easily. With a sprawling open world RPG like Skyrim, it‘s easy to accumulate thousands of save files over hundreds of hours of playtime. And yes – there are methods to mass delete this save data to free up space or have a fresh start!

Fully Wiping Skyrim‘s Save Folder

The quickest way to obliterate all Skyrim saves is to directly delete the entire Saves folder itself. On Windows PCs, you‘ll find this under Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Saves. Simply send this whole folder to the recycling bin. Poof! All gone.

This deletes everything though – autosaves, quicksaves, manual saves…you name it. So only do it if you really want a completely blank slate.

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Close Skyrim and any background processes
2. Open File Explorer and navigate to Documents/My Games/Skyrim/Saves
3. Select the Saves folder and delete it
4. Start Skyrim, which will regenerate a fresh Saves folder

I‘ve used this myself a few times over the years when doing major mod overhauls. It can be nice to just wipe everything when you want a 100% clean profile.

Pick and Choose: Deleting Saves Individually

If you prefer to delete saves selectively versus nuking everything universally, it‘s easy to manage saves individually too.

Browsing and Sorting Saves

Inside that Saves folder you‘ll find all kinds of autosaves, quicksaves, manual saves and more. You can browse around, sort by date modified, etc.

I like to sort by size to find space hogs from longer play sessions. Some of my manual saves are 20+ MB each!

File Names and Types

Here‘s a quick guide to deciphering Skyrim save names:

• Autosave/Quicksave – Autosave_# or Quicksave_#
• Manual Save – Save_#
• File Format – .ess (Elder Scrolls Save)

So something like Quicksave_3.ess would be your third quicksave.

Save Limits and Corruption

A good rule of thumb is to keep total saves under 1000. Skyrim‘s engine can get unstable with save bloat. I once had over 5000 files that kept corrupting!

Now I purge old saves by overwriting manually and deleting quicksaves after using them. Keeping things trimmed prevents slowdowns too.

So browse around your Saves folder and do some spring cleaning!

Backing Up Saves Before Deleting

Wiping mass amounts of Skyrim saves can be anxiety inducing! Before deleting everything, I recommend backing up your saves first.

Copying important saves to an external HDD or cloud storage lets you retrieve them if needed. Storage is cheap, so why not copy your 100+ hour masterpieces somewhere safe?

I back up my "perfect" end game saves this way in case I ever want to fire up an old character years later.

Easy Backup Solutions

• External hard drive
• USB flash drive
• Cloud storage like Google Drive
• Save file management tools

Just remember that as long as the Saves folder itself exists, Skyrim will keep populating it with new files. So move saves somewhere else before clearing out the main folder.

I know some gamers with dozens of saves perfectly preserved like gaming museums!

Bottom Line

So in summary – yes, you can absolutely mass delete saves in Skyrim through some simple file operations. Just be careful not to wipe years of progress accidentally! And implement backup/maintenance habits to keep saves trimmed down.

Let me know if you have any other Skyrim questions! Happy gaming!