Inventory Lost - Is it common and under what circumstances?

Hi All! I'm a newbie in SL and have found it most awesome and fascinating.

However I have recently been told by a friend that item lost from inventory is quite common and I should do regular backup of all my items into boxes and store them at home. While this is obviously great advise I have found myself spending an inordinate amount of time in organising and re-organising stuff, plus there is the questions of no-copy items.

Just wondering how common inventory lost is and what circumstances does it tend to happen? Does it happen only when ((de-)rezzing/wearing, or can it occur just sitting there inside the inventory too?

More than a little nervous here, cos I have been on a major spending spree since I joint up just a few weeks ago. Hehe.

Would greatly appreciate any input.

Some people lose items, some people don't. That's it really, you have to live with that fact, and nothing's forever.

Rosy- Deka is right on the money there really is no way to sugar coat it. Sometimes u lose stuff and sometimes you don't and other times it turns up months later on its own. As for packing it in boxes- even that is not guaranteed as there have been instances when packed stuff would not rezz.

If you're lucky, it's only a few items and they weren't ones you used on a regular bases.. or weren't for sale.

One of the causes of inventory loss is: Linden Labs decides to move assets from one server to another.

Can we prevent it? Nope.

I got off lucky at only losing three items.. *sigh* I just wish they had been old stock that I was willing to lose...

During my 2 years in SL I've only lost one or two items, to my knowledge. Sometimes items go missing but end up in the wrong folders because the drag-and-drop misbehaves. If you can't find something, type it's name in the search window on the inventory panel and you might find it's been accidentally dropped in the wrong place.

I have had one texture on a clothing item that changed inexplicably and I had to throw it away!!!

It IS possible for inventory to get lost. However, it's FAR less common than it was just a year ago.

Packing up copies of things in box prims is a slow, tedious way to insure against loss, and it doesn't help a bit with No Copy items. It's far more trouble than it's worth, IMO.

If you do lose inventory, you can often get it back. Clear your cache, and then relog into an empty (e.g., water only) sim. Open your inventory, and enter something into the search window. You may need to repeat this procedure a couple of times.

If it doesn't work, file a support ticket. There are some things that LL can do on their end.

just think, you stuff your no copy items in a box and rez it on your land, then SL has some wacky glitch and the whole box disappears.

i think it's all much safer in your inventory. besides, things usually become lost during the rez/take process, so doing what you are doing is a iffy proposition.

then, maybe you only lose one item, not them all.

Inventory loss is rarer than you'd think. It's just that it causes a *huge* outcry when it *does* happen, so it tends to be pretty visible and publicized.
In more than a year and a half in SL, I've only had one true inventory screw-up where a folder moved to the top level, making it (and the outfit it contained) inaccessible, and this happened just as I had unpacked the box; the first time I accessed the new outfit in my inventory.

I've had some transaction glitches when the asset server has been slow or down, but that's a slightly different thing.

As has been mentioned, most perceived inventory losses are really just the client getting out of sync with the server, and can be fixed with the clear-cache-relog dance.
Again, I am not saying that it does not happen, and there was a bad spate of losses recently, though it seemed LL found quite a few of those things somewhere under the pillows some weeks later.

I have heard far too many stories of people packing stuff in boxes and then the box fails to res or gets lost or even accidentally deleted from the land and now not only the box but everything in it is lost.

I agree with 3Ring, better to just keep it in your inventory.

I once met someone who stored things in her alt's inventory. Surely things need to be transferable for that to work. Does anyone else do this?

Items can get lost from one avatar's inventory as easily as from another's. I'm not sure what good that would do...except maybe to keep specialized inventory sorted better.

For example, you might use your alt for building, and store all your building textures and tools and linksets in the alt's inventory.

Wow! Thanks for the overwhelming responses in such a short time! You guys are a great bunch.

From the responses and the posts that I have found and read so far:
-Item lost is a fact of SL Life to live with but maybe not as common as I might have feared,
-Item tends to get lost singularly (unless they are all stored inside another prim)
-Items tends to get lost more during rezzing/taking. (although it can still happen inside inventory)
-Dance HUDs tend to represent one of the major losses as it may contain lots and lots of expensive no-copy animations or otherwise

It is so true that organising everything inside layers upon layers of boxes is extremely tedious, think I might stop doing that now. (whew!)

My Strategy:
-Keep all original items inside inventory, especially the no-copy items
-For Important copiable items, I will keep multiple instances of them, first in my inventory maybe in a serperate backup folder, and if I am really paranoid about it, in an external prim as well,
-For important transferable and copiable items, especially created work, may also send to another alt(which is porbably in a different sim, and chances that all the same items are lost at the same time should be minimal?)
-Keep number of no-copy dances/animations low in seperate HUDs, so as to minimise lost should it happen (have read quite a few horror stories of people losing tons of real dollars worth of animations inside one HUD)
-Should I ever get big! (Haha!) may consider using Second Inventory for the items I have created within my fashion empire!

What do you think?

"Inventory loss" is also a grouping label for a number of different things:

* you rez something, at some point within the next hour the sim crashes, you log back on, tp home and find that what you rezzed is gone

Each sim regularly takes a snapshot of its state and when it crashes it will try to continue where it left off but that may not be possible in which case it will roll back to its last saved state, which was before you ever rezzed the item.

Inventory loss like this is permanent, there's nothing that will ever bring the item back.

Since you don't control when sims crash there's little to do about this, except the obvious which would be to never rez valuable things on crowded public sandboxes. There's plenty of quieter sandboxes, or land for sale with rezzing enabled for that matter (it's not a nice thing to do, but if you just need to rez a coalesced bunch of items and pick them up, it is safer).

* you want to clear your land and instead of taking things you just return the whole parcel

Coalescing will make that a rather big pain (on top of the problem that if there's a Linden plant in a coalesced item, you'll have a tough time finding places to rez it if you don't own the land or are part of the group) and you'll need to rez all of it to get it back anyway so just take the time to do it properly the first time around.

Additionally, return is simply not reliable. Everything may come back for everyone, everything may come back for some but not others, everyone may get some things but not others. They may turn up in inventory in a day, they may turn up in inventory in a week.

Inventory loss due to returning is almost entirely preventable: make sure your rent is paid up, don't sell your land if you still have everything on it, etc, etc.

* you buy/take something, it appears in your inventory but when you tp away or relog it's gone

This is permanent inventory loss, the sim told you it was added to inventory but the inventory server was never told (or it didn't receive the operation) so since it was never actually in inventory there's nothing to recover. This was a big problem about a year back, and it's possible that they (hopefully) fixed it entirely.

Regardless, there's a few things you can do to make sure: View / Statistics Bar. If the sim has stuck pending downloads/uploads (any number above 0) take that as a warning sign (additional symptoms will be that not everything will rez, you can't attach attachments, problems rezzing things from inventory, etc, etc). If it jumps from 0 to 30 to 10 to 0 back up to 50 then that's fine. As long as it drops to 0 regularly there's no problem, but even if it only drops down to 1 you'll want to see it as a warning that there's something wrong with the sim.

* rezzing problems (see above)

We used to be able to simply drop inventory into an attached prim without the need to rez it (no idea why they removed that feature) but if you want to add animations to your AO or a chim you'll need to rez it now.

Make sure the sim is healthy (see above), look at the status or forums to see if anyone's complaining about problems (or join a large noisy group since generally half a dozen people will ask if the grid is working when it starts to glitch).

Yes, it should "just work", but it doesn't so it doesn't hurt to take great care when you start rezzing things that are quite expensive to replace.

* empty inventory folders

That's perceived, rather than real, inventory loss. Clear cache, tp to a full Linden water sim (like Hahne, Kara, etc - just make sure it's not an openspace) where you're the only avie on it and relog.

Open your inventory and just type something random in the search box and wait for it to stop saying "xxxx fetched". You can IM, change clothing, attach things, etc, but just don't tp off the sim or you run the risk of getting another incomplete fetch.

If it's still not back, rinse and repeat over the next few days. Things just vanishing from inventory really is very rare and also keep in mind that if you were moving inventory folders around that it's not that difficult to accidentally drop the entire folder onto a prim inventory of moving it around in inventory.

* missing from database errors

Not much you can do about this one. The short explanation is that LL regularly crawls the grid, inventory servers, etc collecting a list of all asset UUIDs that are referenced. Whatever isn't included on that list is an orphaned asset (it doesn't exist in anyone's inventory, inside a prim, rezzed on a sim, applied to a prim, embedded in a notecard, etc etc) which is safe to delete (it doesn't actually get deleted straight away, it's just moved out of the asset server for a while where it can be restored if it turns out it wasn't really orphaned after all).

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Few general things to keep in mind:
* mod-rights: anyone who has mod rights for you can "Take" anything that is rezzed and transfer for you. It's as close to being able to "steal" as SL gets. They also have the ability to "Take Copy" on anything that is both copy and transfer to you. (Items that are deleted now return instead of being actually deleted though)

* "Share with group": when set on an item that is transfer, anyone in the group will be able to "Take" it

* occassional glitches: rezzed items can magically set themselves for sale from time to time (or they can still be set for sale when you rez them after buying them). It's rather rare (or more people would complain about it), but if something does suddenly go missing when it's rezzed, check your transaction history to make sure it wasn't just bought.

* poseballs: might seem obvious, but most poseballs can be "hidden". It's not all that rare for people to think their poseballs have vanished when they're simply hidden. Try things like "show" or "/1 show" to make them appear again, or failing that use View / Highlight Transparent to see if they're not there (sitting on them and standing up will almost always make them visible)

* item count: mentally keep track of how many items you have in your inventory and do regularly clear cache to force a refetch. If you notice that the count is off (by a few hundred, or a few thousand even) do not do any inventory operations and do the clear cache-relog dance or wait until the count is back to what it should be. Little thing to watch out for here is that if LL makes changes to the Library it'll affect your item count as well.

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And probably lots of things I missed but it's a good start .

I don't know how or when it happened, but I lost my hamster. It was a long time ago, I do know that. I've never seen the hamster since. Just an empty folder where it used to be.

Other than that, I can't say I've ever lost anything else. *knocking on prim blocks here*

You can buy something from Xstreet called "Second Inventory - Single Avatar Version".

This claims to be the solution to lost inventory problems; it saves your inventory to your hard disc on your PC.

I am not recommending this. I am just saying that it exists. Maybe other residents can comment on its effectiveness.

It costs L$5999. Whether it is worth paying that for insurance against what seems to be a fairly rare is up to you.

To add to the useless anecdotal evidence.... I've only lost one item in the two months I've been active in SL. For that one item, I put a support ticket in, and the item was restored the next day.

I'd personally say, don't worry about it. If and when it happens, remember the cirumstances and promptly create a ticket with as much detail as you can find (they provide info you should specify on their support page). It's important to be prompt with your ticket, hopefully within 30 minutes of noticing you lost the item.

For my part, I lost a HUDDELZ with 10,000L worth of anims in it, so it was a big deal, and I'm glad Linden's was able to help.

Personally, I use the 'stuff things in a box' method, and I have never (touch wood) had a problem with it. I use it to store no-copy stuff that I don't use or need very often (like xmas stuff, seasonal stuff, for instance). So I move my only copy into a box. I also use it to store copyable stuff that I don't need but might want later - I move a copy into the box then delete the copy that's in my inventory. Finally, I use it to backup my own builds and textures. I move a copy into a box, then depending what it is, I may or may not delete the copy in my inventory.

What I do not do, however, is take the box into inventory. I keep the box rezzed in world. I've probably got about 20 prims used this way, as storage boxes. And I have never, ever, lost anything that was in a box and the box was in-world. What I have lost, is stuff in my inventory. I lost about 200 things once where a ton of stuff suddenly was 'unable to rez' or 'cannot locate asset' or whatever -- the problem where stuff gets "garbage collected" even though it's in your inventory.

Anyhow, I'm a bit of a minimalist, I figure if I stuff something in a box because I'm not using it, then if the box gets lost or the stuff vanishes, how much will I miss it? Once in a while it's good to delete the stuff... I do the same in RL. Don't use it, put it in a box. A year later, if the box hasn't been opened yet, then the stuff isn't needed, get rid of it.

Of course, YMMV. But personally I've never lost any inventory that was inside a box that was left rezzed inworld.

-Atashi

/me votes to make Atashi's post a sticky.

I have several scripted inventory boxes. I did take them into inventory tho and everything in them is missing from the asset server. Thankfully I did this when I was a newbie and most of the items I had stored were worthless anyway. Why do I keep the boxes? I dunno

From that ad on Xstreet SL:

"Second Inventory has a copyright protection system that allowes you to duplicate the item only if you have the Mod/Copy/Transfer permissions, or if you are the original creator of the content. This is usefull also if you made an item and lost the full perms example, you can recreate it from a no perms copy."

So it won't do anything to make backups of anything you purchased from anyone else, unless it's a full-perms freebie.

I have looked into Secondary Inventory and as a few of you have pointed out it is only for full perm items only and at present I don't have many. When I have made enough stuff of my own, it might be a great options. Or maybe just send some copies to another alt.

Right now I'd just stop being paranoid and maybe just make multiple copies of important items stored at different places only.

Thankyou all for the responses again.