I have just accidentally deleted my main PS3 user account. I thought that I selected the second one I had, but clearly I got the wrong one. Whatever happened, all my game saves have gone. Any idea if or how I can get them back?

Idiotically, I have no backup for the PS3.

Been digging on the subject. Will have to live with lost game data. Thankfully stuff in PlayTV has not been lost. Games? I’ll just have to start again.

I am gobsmacked that you can only delete the account if you are logged in as that user. This is what happened.

getting clumsy in your old age

Well, likely. Also that I was logged in as the user I deleted. You would think that your logged in profile would be protected from deletion, would’t you?

Could you not remove the HDD and use a caddy to hook it up to a computer and recover the data?

It seems on PS3 forums that the consensus is that it's irrecoverable. Right now, it's recording some Tv programmes, so I'm guessing that the data is being over written.

It's not the end of the world. I'm starting Skyrim again, but with a bit more knowledge on how the game works.

If I had to restart Skyrim, I'd probably play another game first before going back to it. Some of the stuff would be very tedious.

Aye, I'm in a similar boat with regards Skyrim; playing a spot of World of Tanks at the moment and will then probably play through ME2 in preparation for ME3 coming out before I return to it.

The partial good news is that because I had a month’s worth of PlayStation Plus in the summer (due to their credit card fiasco), I have managed to retrieve my GranTurismo and Infamous save data from that time (July 2012). So not all is lost. I decided that an online backup of my game saves might be a good idea after all. The bonus was that data that was there in the summer is still available to me.

So working through Skyrim once more. I’m liking it, even though I know I have to work through a lot I’ve already done.