SL lost my work... *grumble*

Does anyone have any clever suggestions regarding how to fix this?

I'd spent a couple of hours working hard on my latest avatar-building project, and it was coming along really nicely. So I took it out for a bit of a test wander-about to see how it moved and looked outside of my workshop. I was puttering around my home sim, when I had one of those "flying off into hyperspace" crashes where the client loses contact with the server. But the annoying bit was that when I logged back in again after getting disconnected, my avatar-in-progress wasn't the same as it had been before the crash. Various body parts had reverted to previous stages of completeness - some had lost their textures, others had previous versions of the textures on them, still others were just missing parts or were arranged as they had been earlier on in the building process. There was no rhyme or reason to it - it wasn't simply that the avatar had reverted to an earlier version in the building process, but more as if various bits of it had apparently "gone back in time" by amounts that varied from prim to prim.

It's annoying as all hell - that's a good few hours' work up in smoke. Before I go back and simply rebuild the av by hand, does anyone know of a way to get the client to find the avatar in it's pre-crash state? I've tried clearing cache and that hasn't done anything. Any other suggestions?

The simple answer is to keep backing up your work... frequently. Not necessarily helpful to you right now, but good general advice to other readers of this thread (hopefully).

~Snowman~

Not making your situation seem small in comparison, but I recall when taking an entire day to fix a sim wide structure, making adjustments, fixing textures, doing all the little stuff that I never had time to do...

Then SL shut down and rolled back. I came back in game to see everything back the way I started ruining an entire days work of detailed adjustments.

Actually you might have been disconnected before you started altering it and your viewer did not know it, and when you tried to go out for a walk you finally completed the disconnect. I have had more than one occasion where I was working on a project for quite a while before finding out I had a "silent" disconnect and the changes were only happening on my screen and not on the servers....

That's the first thing that came to my mind, too.

Yup I always make my av walk every 5 or 10 minutes to make sure I've not gone in to slient crash, even losing 5 minutes is annoying as hell, sorry that you lost so much time Nimbus.

Is it sufficient to walk to make the server aware of your av settings? I always quit and logged on again to make sure that my updates get tucked away safely on the server. Is that overkill?

The suggestion of moving about every so often is just to be sure that you are connected to the server. What probably happened in Nimbus' case was he/she had been unknowingly disconnected from the server, and all work done subsequent to that disconnection was only taking place locally. Moving your avatar seems to 'wake up' your client to the fact you no longer have a connection. I've only had it happen a couple of times, but it's a pain the **** when it does.

it's also possible the parts that reverted hadn't triggered a full prim update... and the disconnect interrupt the normal procedure to save all settings... what does and doesn't trigger a full prim update (and thus presumably get saved as more than a buffer change) is really weird... for instance in a script, a rotation change doesn't trigger one, but setting hover text does....

the only way to be sure it to occasionally take the item (or at least a copy) to inventory which should send a copy of the settings to the asset server...

it is odd though because I thought texture changes caused a full prim update but perhpas that's only via script.... or perhaps the update threshhold is different for storing item parameters

This is probably superstitious, but I seem to have more problems with attachments getting "forgotten" than normally rezzed prims. I know of no reason why this should be true, however, hence "superstitious."

Attachments are basically just rezzed prims which each sim will 'cache'/maintain locally (and when you tp from sim to sim each sim is just passing your attachments on to the other). Apparantly it's only when an attachment gets derezzed that the sim will create a new asset representing the last, changed state.

If the sim crashed (or a tp/border crossing failed in handing you over proper to a new sim) it wouldn't have logged you out (saved the state of your attachments) properly or only partially.

If you do any work on an attachment you should either detach it, or relog in order to avoid loosing your work/changes .

I'm not sure there IS a way to recover the avatar.. but as was mentioned earlier in the thread, the best way to not lose all the work is to periodically take a copy of it. I do it every time I make either a major change or a series of minor. Usually no more than three changes at any time.

I think almost all of us have had this happen and in my case, it was a dress, the sim I was in crashed, rolled back and *poof* gone was the dress. It happens to me from time to time now, but I always have a copy to pull out and work from.

Trick is also to keep up the mini-map. If you disco for any reason, it will go red and that when you know you're not getting anywhere. In older versions of the client, there's two bars in the upper right hand corner and if there is no traffic on either, then you've likely disconned.

i've found out that detaching and attaching is enough to save. there was a time when changing something on attachments and quit after would be enough to the new position NOT being saved. so after some changes i dettach and reattach. that should be enough.

but rebooting SL is not overkill. losing work is.

This is what I was thinking. I know I saw a tip about this from a hair designer. That if you are working on your hair (without a copy) and it messes up, if you make a copy of it in your inventry BEFORE you take it off it will make a copy of it as it was before you edited it. Then paste it and you have the older version. If and when you take the prim (or set of prims) off it makes a save of your edits.

Since you were disconnected before you were able to take the attachments off and place them on again, I think it didnt get saved at all. Just another option of what could have happened. Every once in a while, when working with attachments, if you are happy with a placement/texture etc, pop it off and on again to make sure it saved correctly in your inventory.

Sorry you lost all that work though, but maybe the next time you work on it it will be even better

I know the sort of thing you mean, but I don't think that's it. I'd been walking around inside my workshop a fair bit while working on it, and for the five minutes or so before the crash I'd been buzzing around my local sim to check out the animations and suchlike. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

Oddly enough, my standard avatar-building workflow includes regular attaches, drops and take-to-inventory. See, when I'm working on an attachment, I drop it on the floor then do some work on it. When it's looking alright, I take it into my inventory then wear it to see how it looks before dropping it again and working on it some more. It's an iterative process since I generally edit one small aspect of it at a time then put it on to see how it looks in context. So if saving stuff to inventory is enough to make the changes fully save, all my attachments should have saved correctly, since wearing them is the *last* stage in the process, for me.

Unless I could have been disconnected without knowing it *while* wandering around my sim for a while (a phenomenon I've not yet encountered, to my knowledge) I don't think that's the issue. This advice (checking connections, taking stuff to inventory periodically, etc) is all very good advice, but since I was already doing that I'm thinking there was something else going on, which is what has gotten me so puzzled.