How can I keep my saved Skyrim game off other Windows user accounts?

We have Skyrim on our PC and 4 of us play the game at different times on our own Windows accounts. We have noticed within the last few months that all saved games are now showing up on all user accounts. If I'm logged in to my Windows account and I launch the game then go to load my saved game, I will see every saved game for every person that has played on our computer. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention in the beginning and didn't notice before, but I'm pretty sure that this was not happening before a few months ago. I installed the game the day it came out in Nov. so we've been playing it for awhile and we did not notice this issue until a few months ago. Forgive me if this has already been addressed, but I tried several different ways of phrasing this issue in Google search and got nothing.

Solution 1:

It's due to Steam Cloud. It places all saved games in the cloud and loads them when you start the game. If you turn off the cloud in the steam settings then individual windows users can keep their own saved games again.

Solution 2:

It's very strange that even though you all have different windows accounts you are still experiencing this problem.

Anyway, the simplest solution is that while saving the game each of you just add your initials to the starting of the name. So it would be something of this sort:

AH - save 1
X - save 2
Y - save 3
AH - save 4
AH - save 5
and so on.

Alternatively, each of you can create your own save game locations of your choice. You can then make Skyrim use each of these different location for different people.

*1. Create 4 different folders (such as d:\saveAH, d:\saveX, d:\saveY).

*2. You will now need to tell windows to redirect the folder requests to your new folder for different people. This can easily be done via a batch script. You will have to use mklink to accomplish this.

mklink /d “c:\users\\My Documents\my games\skyrim\saves\” “D:\saves”

*3. Basically create 4 batch files with the above code (just replace the "d:\saves" with a different folders in each batch file).

*4. Now each of you just run your batch file and play the game. Voila! Different save locations for all of you. More detailed step-by-step instructions are given here.

Happy gaming!