Inventory backups and offline archives
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Anicha Heartsong
Provide a way for residents to back up important aspects of their inventory as a fallback / failsafe to recover in case of inventory loses. In addition, provide an offline archive and respository to make it easy to prune older inventory items, but recover and activate them at a future date. Essential feature: retain folder structures correctly throughout. (The boxing technique for storing items long term does not retain folder structures, making it effectively useless). You could provide both features as perks for Premium membership. You could charge for larger archives or backups, as a way of funding these features.
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Crexon Resident
This will never happen since the inventory itself is nothing more then just a "list" of what the server is saying your inventory is. And for security sake the server is ALWAYS consider right as these systems rely on a authoritative server.
Outside of that, think if say I were to have my own offline inventory list, I removed some items you forced it to the server and server just accepts it. cool.
Now say I want to add those items back, as you purposed I will also add in few extra items
wink wink
and the server just accepts those are now part of my inventory. Even if it went through and did double checks to make sure you should own those items, that just slows down the loading of the inventory, which we need it to be faster then it is now, not slower. And the server would have to keep multiple copies of your inventory to all check against as well.
Also for inventory losses LL already does this and keeps its own inventory backups and you can submit a ticket to LL to recover lost inventories.
Madi Melodious
How do you handle non copy items?
Arcane Portal
You can back up the inventory cache file linked to your account in your Second Life cache folder, it will be something like YourAvatarUUID.inv.gz . This will save the loaded inventory asset list at the time of file creation, which is basically all your inventory actually is; a list of server-side assets. This might not be exactly what you're looking for since you have to back it up every time you change your inventory, but it's one option for now until something official is implemented.
AlettaMondragon Resident
Arcane Portal I don't think that would actually help when someone has a real inventory loss issue, and when the problem is with the inventory cache file itself, the solution is to delete it and let the inventory reload on the next login, in a relatively lag free region. Now if you save a backup of the newly created inv.gz file and then two weeks later it looks like some items are missing again, and replace the current file with that backup, it is a good question how it would work. Load the inventory to that state correctly and then it would only have to download the items you got in those two weeks? I doubt this wouldn't just cause more problems.
Arcane Portal
AlettaMondragon Resident If there is an actual server-side asset issue that has impacted your inventory then of course the only way to sort that out is to wait for Linden Lab to fix things. If it is with the cache file itself then backups should be okay as long as you didn't back up a corrupted cache in the first place. Syncing a local and server-side list is a trivial matter so I wouldn't worry about problems there. From a practical point of view though, the best fix for the average user is what you already mentioned with just deleting it and logging into a lag free region.
That said, I feel like it is worth mentioning that the ability to save local inventory backups, and load them in-viewer is functionality has existed in the third party viewer world since at least around 2014-ish, and the code still works fine to this day. With a few much needed security tweaks I feel like this could be turned into something Linden Lab could make good use of for official implementation.
Jelly Doll
Arcane Portal To anyone reading this .. please don't do this.
A list of your items is not your items and can't be used to restore your items, nor can it be handed to LL .. it's useless busy work and no better than attempting back up your PC by taking a screenshot of disk drive icons.
Arcane Portal
Jelly Doll Nobody has suggested that a list of your items is the same as having the item assets themselves, and it should have been clear that Linden Lab would be needed to fix an actual inventory loss issue. An inv.gz file
could
actually be handed back to LL though if for some reason they lack a backup.What people consider inventory loss most of the time is often just a corrupted cache or problems loading your inventory structure from the server, hence the posts above. Once again, if there is an actual asset server problem then Linden Lab has to fix that, in which case it doesn't matter what tools anyone has access to unless we are given the ability to download all of the actual assets in our inventory in their entirety, which is extremely unlikely to ever happen.
linda Foodiboo
I'm a designer, and my inventory is bursting at the seams with products I've purchased and then put up for sale, including textures and notecards I use for selling. I tried deleting many textures, considering I can always reimport them for free with a premium subscription, but I realized I'm just deleting and reimporting them. Perhaps we could create a section in the inventory that links directly to a folder on my computer where I can retrieve textures and items? A sort of link like the ones in the saved outfit folders.
AlettaMondragon Resident
linda Foodiboo
"I tried deleting many textures, considering I can always reimport them for free with a premium subscription, but I realized I'm just deleting and reimporting them."
Oh yes, the asset server loves that. All those textures you delete from your inventory still stay stored on the asset server, you just "severed your links" to them, and when you upload them again and again you multiply the same textures as different assets. Please do this with 2k textures, too, to increase the load even further. We really need even more asset server issues.
linda Foodiboo
Unfortunately not everyone is so educated about assets and servers, luckily there are people like you who with their sarcasm make sure that others can learn, I thought this was the right place despite jokes like yours
Loni Onyx
I have almost 300k items in my inventory, i am a designer and an avid sl shopper, I let it get out of control lately and wish there was a way to organize it. Could this suggestion also be used in that aspect?
Anicha Heartsong
Loni Onyx That's very much how I anticipate this being used - the archive could be a place where you store things you might need to retrieve one day, but don't need to have live in your inventory on a daily basis. You might not need them for months or years, perhaps never. The intention is to reduce the load on the servers etc. Clearly there would need to be size limits, maybe also charges for the storage space, to prevent people from dumping gigabytes of data and forgetting about it. It is essential, in my view, that it can preserve whatever folder structures you have created in your inventory. It's the work involved in creating those structures that needs to be preserved, as well as the links to stuff in an asset server.
SL Feedback
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SL Feedback
Hello, and thank you for your feature request regarding inventory backups and offline archives. This is indeed a valuable suggestion, and another resident has previously brought up a similar idea. We have found a duplicate of your request in Second Life's previous bug tracking system (BUG-5650), and we will be merging your comments to help prioritize this feature. While we cannot provide an estimate on when this might be implemented, please keep an eye on future updates. We appreciate your input and hope you continue to share your ideas to help improve Second Life. Thank you!