Inventory loss poll

Continued anecdotes about inventory loss from various people, including this probably little seen thread from the Products Wanted forum, made me wonder how rampant the problem actually is. As we have no ability to back up our inventories and the TOS clearly spells out how unresponsible LL is for our inventories and that nothing is worth anything, it makes me very nervous. I am curious what other people's experiences have been.

I lost maybe one or two things, but nothing huge.

I shudder at the possibility of losing more.

As my RL consulting business which uses SL as a game platform is starting to get more busy, this issue makes me more nervous with each passing day. What happens if I work on a project for 3 months and it all disappears? How do I explain that to a client?

This would be a really great issue for the various watchdog/lobbyiest groups to pick up. Maybe we can even come up with a good voting proposition that we could all throw our votes behind (I'd throw all 10 votes at it).

It will be interesting to see how many people have sufferred an inventory loss of any kind. I know my builder has lost textures before...

Inventory loss was not a big problem for me prior to January 2005. Then in January, when the asset server began failing, I experienced major losses such as the loss of my texture folder that contained every texture that I had, including one of a kind ones that I made and many that I had purchases.

Recently losses seem more frequent. It is not unusual for me to try to rezz a prim from inventory and receive the message that the item is not on the data base. I lost so many expensive animations that way, and have noticed other costly things missing such as skins.

I asked Kona Linden about the "not in data base" message and he said sometimes the item shows up in inventory again upon relog, but if the item remains missing for one week its usually gone permanently.

It is frustrating that there is really no secure way to store inventory. I think this is a big problem Cris.

TIP: One of the things we are doing as a best effort against catostrophic inventory loss, is that we give a copy of each object/texture/script/etc to everyone on our team (3 people), and we try to leave any of our big projects also out in the world. Hopefully this will protect us if one of us looses inventory. However I'd be lieing if I said our distributed approach was always up to date (mostly only after major milestones) and would do very little if all 3 of our inventories were wiped.

Of course this tip only works if your creating content and have full perms.

Well my inventory loss, as described in the thread posted by Cristiano and also here OMG...My Inventory, has been recent. To think that I could take off everything I was wearing, TP home and lose 2 entire folders of all my body parts is a bit annoying. Then it happend AGAIN 2 days later after I went and repurchased everything I could.

While my plight of possibly never again being able to wear "my hair" is pretty meaningless, I cannot imagine what a blow this could be to content creators who lose valuable products.

For now all I can do is log into the Preview and look at my hair there.

I lost a couple of scripts I was working on last year, but I havnt had any problems recently.

-Adam

I lost two spanish galleons worth L$3,000 a piece.

I chalked it up to piracy on the high seas.

I lost a script I was working on for Primmies. Really freaked me out, 'til I realized one of my (compulsive) backups had all the code.

Otherwise, besides "Creator: (nobody)" issues, I've not suffered inventory loss. But then, I compulsively backup items AND keep versions of my scripts offline.

I lost for more then 20k inventory in the 1st 2 months.
I emailed and Robin Linden replied that an "inworld investigation team" would contact me...
It never happened. I emailed again. He replied again. I noticed he replied *using same same same words*. Meaning = pre-written BS. I was a bit shocked about it, so I emailed that I noticed the pre-written and that I'd expect and hand written explanation of "what IS that investigation team". He never replied to my many emails I sent after that, he/they started ignoring me.

That's all I am going to say about it, because it means enough.
Except that I dared to contact designers from whom I bought the stuff I lost, and they were 98% of them nice enough to replace the items. THAT amazed me a lot and I am greatful these people are understanding like that. End.

The results of this poll, combined with some of the posts, are terrifying. I was hoping that the ratio would be far better than it is. I am very supportive of Linden Lab, but when it comes to the issue of data loss, I have very little tolerance. None of us should have any, it is inexcuseable. I hope that as much effort as seems to have been put into crafting iron-clad CYA terms of service has been placed in developing solutions for this problem.

I would be willing to pay a fee every month for "inventory" insurance. IE--i provide the insurer a list of my inventory items, updated weekly. I pay a monthly fee. The insurance provider keeps copies of my inventory on an alt or two...if I lose stuff in an update or sim crash or whatever, I get out my list, figure out what is missing, file a claim, new "inventory" replaced.

Only probs I see with this: a significant portion of my inventory is no transfer (skins, hair, clothes, furniture). If content providers would cooperate by providing the insurer transferrable products, that would be cool, and would save me so much money I spend replacing things...also if things get deleted by the asset server (thanks for tellling me this Mulch), every item with that name gets deleted.

Anyway, just an idea I don't have the money to put into existence, but something I'd be willing to pay for.

Hmm. A fee for stability and reliability. Now there's an idea. Then again, you DO get what you pay for. I pay nothing, so overall, I expect nothing. Maybe one reason LL offers Second Life as a gratuitous product, is because they can't propagate such results.

Then again, one could argue: "What about everyone who IS paying per month?" Well, what is it they're actually paying for? Think about it.

Access to friends across the world
Access to old friends who moved away and now can "see" more often
Access to technology that is engaging and satisfying
Access to programmers/scripters/content creators who are building virtual worlds
Access to education
Ability to be someone different for a little while every day
Ability to fly
Ability to learn new skills
Ability to engage in discourse not available where I live
Ability to own "land" (even if not guaranteed to be there day to day)
Ability to build things I can only imagine
Chances to experiment w/ solving real world problems on a small scale
Studying different societies/same societies in a virtual world to apply on a larger scale
Studying systems for real world applications
Studying race, class, gender, etc. for real world job

That's what my $8 a month pays for...but have to be honest. Every time I've lost inventory, I just send a note to support w/ "lost inventory" in the subject line and Kona Linden sends it back If it were a major problem for me, I'd probably stop buying so many skins...lol.

PS-the money I spend "replacing things" is usually cause I've broken them attempting to change scripts, or if I unlinked them and can't get them back together, lol.

I've lost a few things. When you get the dreaded error that says "Asset not found" or somesuch thing. I had some cloned backups on hand... and yeah, with 1.7 it'll be easier to backup copiable stuff! One time, I was archiving my schtuff into plywood cubes and Catherine Omega helped me count 'em. That was a shining moment I remember fondly.

I'll share why one of the fundamental reasons why I buy content from nice peeps: 'cuz if I lose it, they're more willing to oblige and send another my way! w00t, mint customer service.

Another time, I lost my FREAKIN' PROFILE! There was a dreaded bug that wiped out all my text yet others could see (unless you were affected by the same damn bug). It kept doing it. It was rare, happened to very few Resis, not sure why but it did. I'd like to salute KONA and DON LINDEN for going through that mess-of-hell with me, and taking the time to finally get it worked out. By 1.6 it was fix0red.

Historical basis:

/111/73/30144/1.html

hundreds of things. worth probably hundreds of dollars. some certainly worth weeks of my time.

some just plain dont exist any more. some are listed in my inventory but either aren't in the database or crash the client outright when you rez them.

some are bugged in such a way that they kill the client for anyone! Philip knows this. I crashed him three times proving it.

and it was this and LL's complete lack of giving a shit that made me sell up my sim and leave.

Until recently my losses from inventory were small. Not sure how many will remember the ballroom at Stardust, but I built it as the reception area for our wedding. When we changed the island, I took the ballroom in...being very careful to make sure all pieces were included with the last piece being called Stardust Ballroom. I went to set it out not long ago, and it wasn't in the Stardust folder. I searched my inventory and found an object called Stardust Ballroom........but upon setting it out...it was the boat dock from Stardust. The ballroom is gone.

Even some sort of weekly backup solution would be a good start. I'd be willing to pay to have my assets backed up every Wed at 2 AM or something like that. Ultimately I'd expect not to pay, but would be willing to do so as a short-term solution to help LL manage resources in a cost-effective way.

P.S. Has anyone seen a proposal on the voting feature that is workable? I don't think exporting your creations to disk is one the Lindens will move quickly on.

Last night I lost two pictures / textures when I moved them from the top level textures folder to a sub folder, they just dissapeared in the process! Shortly after, I relogged and got the "Moving your inventory to a faster database..." message. Coincidence ?

Apart from that I've never lost a thing except when stuff was returned from my land by accident and never arrived in my inventory.

concerned about whether or not I was losing inventory, I created a notecard that lists all my inventory items.





but I can't find it now

/me swats Ben

To my knowledge, I've never lost anything in my inventory.

Then again, I have over 12,000 items in my inventory. Half of those, are named 'Object'.

I probably wouldn't even know it if a quarter of my inventory went missing.


/waits patiently for 1.7 & multi-select to begin the housecleaning

I personally haven't suffered any inventory loss. Items have shown up missing before but have always reappeared after relog or within a day. The numbers are shocking tho. I thought that it was a just a few isolated occassions where this would happen.

MJ

My inventory stays pretty trim, well below 4k items, post-cleaning is typically closer to 3k. I don't know it that makes a difference really; but I've never had anything disappear.

Yes, I have lost myriad objects to random lossage. Of the objects I am certain that have dissappeard are textures that I have created and uploaded as I put all textures in a specific local folder prior to upload and back that folder up regularly. There are times when I go to use a texture that I have uploaded and find that it is no longer in my inventory, yet my local upload folder still contains it and I have even found items rezzed in world that contain that texture, so the asset server still holds it. I just no longer have a pointer to it in my inventory.

I know one player who was filing extensive lossage reports about 1.5 years ago containing scrupulously kept manual logs of inventory names and UUIDs and was sending them into LL who never "found" the objects nor asserted a solution; for this player it was particularly noticable as his one and only avatar disappeared (along with many other items).

Before I quit Live Help as I got tired of apologizing for lossage and having to tell people there was no recourse with LL (among others things like "I paid L$20k for this TV and video won't work for me and my friends and there's nothing I can do but beg the merchant for a refund?", I had seen at least 5 people that had major texture data corruption for items like faces that were "fine" for a month prior (something that one or others would likely notice). Having them pass me a copy of the texture and downloading it to my local machine confirmed that the texture data was indeed corrupt. In all cases where a re-upload was possible, it "fixed" (i.e. replaced) the data damage. Note that as these were skin textures they had to be standard size (512x512) targas.

I also know of one player (I think the saga is in these forums) who had texture folder (i.e. asset meta-data) corruption so bad that she could neither upload nor use textures. The problem was resolved by getting LL to zap her entire texture folder and give her a new empty one. Had she not gotten past LL support to someone who could actually do DB administration, she likely would still have an unusable folder.

But do remeber, according to section 4.3 of the Second Life Terms of Service: "All Data On Linden's Servers Are Subject to Deletion, Alteration or Transfer." and "LINDEN DOES NOT ADMIT, PROVIDE OR GUARANTEE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ... ANY VALUE, CASH OR OTHERWISE, ATTRIBUTED TO ... DATA."