Protecting my stuff from Inventory Death

So, I keep reading these posts about things dissapearing out of residents Inventories.
This freak me out. I just did a giant shopping spree yesterday and I will freak if things start dissapearing.
What are some steps I can do to protect my items incase of Inventory death?

If the objects are copyable, one solution is to rez a cube inworld, and put copies of the purchases into the cube. I do this all the time, the only caveat I will add is that I *do not* take the cubes back into inventory - I leave them rezzed in world (I have a storage closet just for this purpose). And in 2+ years I have never had a backup box vanish from inworld, nor have I had inventory vanish from inside a rezzed backup box.

The concern if you stuff things into a cube then take the cube into inventory, is that if the cube itself goes missing then you lose everything in it... still if these are backups, then that's not so critical.

Another option for transferable stuff, is create an alt and give the transferable stuff to the alt to hold onto. This isn't necessarily backing up, so much as a way to distribute some inventory, such as stuff you have bought but aren't using and don't need at the moment.

Although it's a pain in the ***, if something goes missing you can frequently contact the merchant and ask them to replace it. Everyone knows that SL can lose things, and many merchants will replace a lost purchase if you 'have the receipt'. By which I mean, your transaction history will show you the date and transaction number of the purchase. You can download this from the website, and it's a good idea to do so as it's only kept for 30 days on the web.

Finally, the Lindens do *seem* to be addressing the missing inventory issue, as I have heard several reports of lost stuff being found and returned; I've also heard that inventory is an issue they are working on behind the scenes.

-Atashi

Hmmm, I freaked out over it when I first started SL. To be honest though I've yet to actually loss anything permanently. I've had a couple odd glitches with things disappearing, but either a support ticket, cache clear, or just ignoring it for a day brought it back. Even then, if I were to loose a t-shirt I wouldn't be out much. The things that would suck to lose are things like your HUDDLEZ full of animations (yea, I lost that once, thank god it came back the next day). I would say "don't sweat it". *shrug*

Unfortunately, I have

I had several THinC cubes that I left rezzed in world for backup purposes. At first I separated them into copy and no-copy sets, but as my stored inventory grew, I simply put items I wasn't using (copy and no copy) with like items: clothing, textures, builds, etc.

One of these cubes poofed into thin air after having been rezzed well over a year. I did all the typical things (cleared cache, went to the 0,0,0 co-ords, looked in lost & found, etc.)

I contacted live help. The customer rep. said if the items had been in my inventory, *then* they could likely find it, but since it was rezzed in world they could not. On a suggestion from another forum poster to have the sim reset, I was also told by live help plus the response from my support ticket that LL *never* resets mainland sims due to the disruption to other residents.

I notice you said you only put copy items in rezzed prims now. Good idea. I will never again put no-copy items within in world storage now. (I lost a LOT of items that day.)

Now I mainly use alts for transfer items I don't use regularly.

I submitted a jira issue on this: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1520

That's why I made my time dilation meter HUD, I don't rez things when it's red and I make sure it's a copyable items if it's yellow!

But if it's green the sim isn't about to die and you'll be okay. In years of SLing, the only items I lost they are fixing in the next version (rezzing coalesced items with Linden plants). Only one friend lost anything of significant value (and although it seems like thousands of L$ is valuable, it's really only ten to forty dollars).

Meanwhile, for every horror story in the forums of "OMG, my X worth X is gone!" you never hear a week later "...OMG, I logged back in and there it was" or "I'd dropped it in a subfolder of different items in my inventory" or "I'd held control and dropped it into the contents of my floor instead of rezzing it" or "the Lindens recovered it and there it was in my Lost and Found"... Because it's emotional when you can't find it, but not as exciting when you've replaced it or moved on and it shows up is it?

Remember also your inventory is not an item. It's a name of an item. Just a list. That list can get screwed up by connection (packet loss) issues or crashing at the wrong time or whatever, but the sim still did what it needed to do. So simply clear your cache, relog, then do a search in your inventory to get it to load the list fresh and might find the list on the servers was complete while the list in your viewer wasn't, voilà!

Trust me, if my rezzed storage boxes had reappeared, I would have been posting a follow-up. I only posted about the storage boxes as that was the topic of this thread, but about the same time I lost several pieces of furniture that were rezzed in world as well.

If you read back through the threads, about the time this happened, others posted about similar occurrences. Some of the items eventually reappeared...others didn't.

My main point is there is really no "sure fire" method of "never" losing inventory. One can just take precautions, throw a chicken bone over the shoulder, and jump up and down three times during a full moon.

Actually, the concern here is that if the contents are never in inventory OR rezzed, they'll be deleted from the asset server for "garbage collection".

Garbage collection is what the asset servers do to free up space for stuff that just isn't anywhere any more. It's terribly important. If you're a builder, think of all the stuff you've rezzed, fiddled with, and then deleted. For most of us who make content, the number of things we've deleted vastly exceeds the number of things we keep. Unfortunately, SL can't do something as simple as only collecting garbage when people empty their trash (though that can be used as a hint).

I'm not sure whether object contents inworld are free from garbage collection.

The only way I'm sure to be free from garbage collection is to have it in inventory or inworld.

This subject gets complicated due to the distinction between an instance of an object and the essence of the object (I don't remember the techical term for "essence" that LL uses, but it's what all copies of the same object share). Some things don't have instances at all, like textures.

But I am sure that if you upload a texture, put it in a box (with no other copies anywhere), keep that box in your inventory, and wait a few months, when you go to pull it out you'll get "asset missing from database". I'm confident that this same problem applies to all types of assets, though the details on just what and how it can go wrong are likely to vary.