Suggestions on Inventory backup systems?

kk, This is comming up due to the massive amounts of inventory loss threads as well as hearing about it in-world a lot.

I know that you can store Copy items in a prim on your parcel (or even copies of that box in your inventory), but I have near 15,000 inventory items.

Making boxes for folders (since some moron at LL never ~thought~ about letting folders be moved into prim contents), and going down my inventory line by line is NOT gonna happen. I have neither the time, nor patience for such an endevor (yes, I realise that's a failing of mine).

I know there are "inventory organizers" out there to organize your inventory. Will any of them take the Copy items in my inventory and place them in such an organizer, so I can then leave the organizer on my land?

If there are, do people have a prefernce for which ones work best?

If there is no such thing, would it be possible to script this? My scripting skills are simplictic to moderate, and this type is out of my league.

~Jessy

Jessica, the two ways of backing up SL inventory are using storage prims or transferring items to an alt.

Neither one solves the problem of No Copy items, and neither one is convenient or simple. I've about given up, and am just going to trust to fate and LL and let the items fall where they may.

I thought I was getting a little bloated when I hit 4,000 items, until I met a guy with over 39,000 items in his inventory. (!!!!!)

Well, if we can have an inventory organizer system that's scripted, why not one that does your Copy items in such a manner for storage?

I know scripts can "see" what's in yoru inventory because there are those that hand out notecards upon entry on lands, but only IF you don't already have that notecard.

AS for how much is in people's inventories....we had that Forum thread in General (gone now) about a year ago. I think the "winner" ahd like 70k in items. Some builders can get insanely high in number due to the need to take in different builds as they go to save their work.

~Jessy

I just have to send a heads up about the storing of items on your land in a single prim. Been there, done that, lost it all. This was storing no copy items though, I should have known better. I took the time to make a box for each folder (omg I would love to put folders in boxes) and then put those box into a single prim. No good, too bad so sad too...database issues hit things that arent sitting in your inventory. My poor little Storage Chest will never see light again.

I wish they would come up with a way to fix this issue, period. Its causing more problems than items just disappearing. People are spending less on shopping, why buy something when you dont know if it will be there when you want it down the road. *sniffles* I miss shopping!!! May as well go buy some freebies lol

I've been working on a tool for builders who want to have an offline backup of their builds.

with plenty of L spent and a few of the items paid for not getting into my inventory,,,, I am working on a tool too, it's called the "No Shopping Tool". It works by keeping all your L in your account, and produces no inventory lost in the system.

LL please bring back SHOPPING with no worry of being Ls lost for items paid for which are forever lost in space........

BTW, does LL give some L$ if they can't restore the lost item after you submitted a ticket ?
I've read "300L$" in the blog's comment.

I store my items in my shoes, that way when I cross a sim boundary, they're conveniently placed in a secure location.

My understanding is that it doesn't matter where you store your items, even if they are in storage prims, they are still tied to your inventory and can vanish just as easily as anything else.

I don't understand why we can't have a total inventory backup to our local computer that encrypts no copy items. That way we could restore missing items and only ever have 1 copy of the no-copies.

Given that our sl revolves around our inventory, I would think there would be more consideration about keeping it safe.

I brought this subject up sometime ago, and the net result was, there is no solution, too bad.

We've now arrived at the topic of a thread from yesterday, backing up inventory to disk. Please note the 2nd post has instructions on voting in JIRA for a tool that does this.

/13/cc/204928/1.html

For a direct link try here:
https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-358][url=https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-358]https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-358[/url]

However, I see a glaring hole in this line of logic for those that would exploit the system. No matter how well you encrypt something, once it's on their own HD, it can be broken by those that want to do so.

This might work for Copy items, but NoCopy going to your HD? Ummm....No. I don't want that. Will cause more headaches than it solves.

~Jessy

Seems to me that there are numerous ways already for copying no copy items. If someone wants to take 6 months to break out an encrypted item, I say let them.

So whats the problem?

Say you come up with a great idea to sell a product. You build it, script it and a texture it. Sell it NoMod/NoCopy/Transfer. Permissions needed for protecting the scripts in this particular hypothecial case.

Someone makes a backup copy to their HD. They ahve already broken LL's encryption (because come on, LL can't even get customer support right, how are they going to be able to do encryption). Now your item is for sale on the market by this person. You're out all the profits of furture sales.

That's the problem.

And the ways to save your Copy inventory is to go through them one by one and place them in a prim, or send them one by one to an alt. Been great if I had realised two years ago that LL can't run a database correctly. Now it's a bit of a daunting task, which is why I am looking for a scripted item that does it. Lazy yes, but going through 15k of items one by one is not how I want to spend a month in SL.

~Jessy

You can actually copy a folder to your alt with up to 42 items in it, not a huge improvement but quicker than 1 item at a time, i deliberately keep no more than 42 items in a single folder these day for that very reason

A bit better yes *grins* And I'm very happy you have the insight to do that NOW.

I have a mess of an inventory (even with the organization I do). It'd prolly take me just as long to sort into 42 items folders LOL. Ah well *shrugs* A girl can always dream of a better closet, can't she?

~Jessy

If they use one of the many AES encrpytion libraries available with
an 128bit key, then it would take about 10 to the power of 13 years to brute force the encryption using todays faster computers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute_force_attack) and they could use a 256 bit key if that was too short a time.

As the encryption/decryption would be done server side, the only way you could crack an encrypted backup would be if someone at LL leaked the key!

So an encrypted backup is far less of a concern if you are worried about theft then the very easy ways that already exist for copying prims and textures (which I won't repeat here).

However, providing a backup facility does not necessarily imply a backup to a local disk. The backup could be stored somewhere else on the LL network (say on a tape library operated and accessible by LL) or on outsourced storage (e.g. Amazon S3), so that you never actually have direct access to your backups - LL could easily recover the cost of this storage by making this a premium only service (which would increase the number of premiums) or charging some fee (e.g. L$100 to backup and L$100 to restore).

There are plenty of ways of implementing a backup system which does not compromise the permissions system (which is already compromised for everything apart from scripts anyway).

Matthew

But why would they. Its a lot easier just to copy in world. Anything that is depicted on a PC can be copied. Vendors are being ripped off all the time.

I'd be content with a working grid. If there is no inventory loss anymore, I don't need a backup system.

My questions are unless you are a builder or texture maker or similar is are you using it all?
Will it be good to still have when the grid shuts down in next 5 years?
Would friends/noobs enjoy some of the content you don't enjoy any longer?
You'd have better stuff by now, and the inventory moths will get it sooner or later, I think big inventories make bigger targets
And with so much stuff it's easy to say a folder has been eaten by SL then find it 3 months later inside another folder.
I met someone the other day who had never emptied their deleted items folder........

Secure perhaps but not comfortable

I don't agree. We still need a backup. Even the most reliable systems have backups.

Yes.
1) I am a builder. Who isn't in SL? o.0
2) Those things not applied to building; Yes I still use it all. I have a HUGE number of clothes (go figure *giggles), and change on a daily basis. I'm of the mindset that one doesn't always need to look the same in SL. I change clothes, hair, shoes all the time. Jumping through my inventory and combining with past sets to make new ones. Part of the fun in SL for me.
3) 15,000 items is actually quite small for 2 years in SL. We ran a poll about a year ago to find who had the most in inventory. Then I had about 11,000 (so only a 4k growth in a year), but the "winner" had around 70,000 items in inventory. I believe that Resident was a builder/seller but I can't recall. Was in General Forums if you wish to try to look it up.




Irrellivant. It is good now. If not good in the future, I will pass it on or delete it.




Yup, and I do so all the time. Thing is, I buy Copy by default (because of the shotty database issues) so can't pass on NoTrans items, and even if it's Copy/Trans, then I still have that copy even if passed on now don't I?




I track my inventory count on a daily basis and have removed the Linden Library with using a 3rd party Client so that changing number doesn't effect me.

I also have folders very neatly and well organized for what is where and am quite proficiant at using the inventory search to find things as I rename what I can so I can find it easier.

What I did not do, and the crux of this post, is transfer FOLDERS to a prim. If I could do that, I could sort by typong COPY in the search and transfering it all in one shot fromt here.

However, some genius-idiot at LL never thought to allow that. Which is dumb because that simple thing would allow for easier backups and prevent a lot of the angst of lost inventory and remove a hgue % of the Support Tickets filed on this due.

~Jessy