Complete Loss of 30K+ Inventory and all Business Content

I logged in this morning to find my entire inventory of 30K+ items, the vast majority of which are business related content created by myself for the past 3 years has ceased to exist...or at least to be accessible by me as inventory.

Before you ask, yes, I relogged multiple times, changed sims multiple times, relogged some more...I tried searching, checking recent, and any other trick I could think of to force the inventory to load. problem was it -was- loaded. Only 2,150 items remain however...not a single piece of which is any of the thousands of products I created for my business.

I have filed a bug report, but honestly don't expect any answer on that as I have never gotten an answer to a bug report before in 3 years here. Beyond that I have no idea who to contact or what to do next to have Linden lab work on recovering my lost business critical data I pay them thousands a month to host. Since Live Help and any other means of contacting a live person as been removed to avoid having to directly deal with such emergencies, I am at a loss for how to proceed.

If I don't get an answer here, I suppose I start emailing and IMing every Linden I can find until someone answers.

Please see bug report #847650 as well.

Also see the entry at my Blog for more feedback:

http://boneflower.blogspot.com/2007/05/three-years-in-second-life-just-ceased.html

Gee Zoe, I'm sorry this happened to you. Just hoping for you that the stuff is still on a data server somewhere and will show up again. Please keep us posted about what happens.

Hopefully a conscientious and kindhearted Linden is reading the forum for items like this. Good luck.

UPDATE::

Huge huge thanks to Cherry Tokyo for her kind help in solving this. She sent me a couple notecards that had a list of steps to perform to -usually- successfully return your inventory after something like this happens. Most of the steps were things I had already done, from relogging, going to empty sims, using serch and recent items searches, and clearing cache. They didn't work when I did them before...but for some reason when done in the order the notecard lists, it eventually worked for me.

Thank you so very very much Cherry, and also huge thanks to those that commented here or in world with support and kind words.

Text of the notecard that worked for me is here below...

How to find "Lost Inventories" due to the new Coalesce feature

In a feature release a couple of weeks ago, we incorporated a new feature to help with load on our databases when Residents return objects from parcels. As before, lost objects can be found in the Lost & Found folder, but there is a change in how they are displayed. When objects are returned to this folder, they will be coalesced into one or more of the returned objects.

The way it works is that the system randomly selects one of your returning objects as the item to be bundled with, hence the word "coalesce". This one object is actually a combination of all of the other returned objects from the same area. When you rez that object inworld from your L&F folder, it will rez all of your coalesced items in the same formation it was last placed inworld before having been returned to you. If your items are being returned from various areas in a sim, you may receive several of your returned objects in your L&F folder. Again, each these will be bundled with rest of your returned items. This will only happen when multiple objects are returned at the same time from the same parcel or region.

Here's a good way to find your returned items, utilizing the inventory tools:
" Open your Inventory
" Select the Recent Items tab
" In your Inventory toolbar, left-click on FILTERS, select MODIFY CURRENT
" When the Recent Items window opens, go to the bottom of that window and adjust the Hours Ago or Days Ago back to the approximate time your Inventory should have been returned from the parcel
" Untick all categories except OBJECTS
" In your Inventory toolbar, left-click on SORT, select DATE
" Go to a parcel where you have enough prim usage to rez all your coalesced objects (do it in a sim where it's not laggy or you could risk losing all your items if the sim should crash due to a sim rollback. If you go to a sandbox, select one that's not busy or laggy!)
" Rez objects inworld from your Lost & Found folder, starting from the top, one at a timeIf after following the above instructions, your returned items have still not rezzed, please be sure to check the land parcel it was returned from and determine whether it was truly returned. If the items being returned were DEEDED to a group, they will be returned to the Resident who originally deeded the objects to the group ONLY IF the objects were not copyable. If the deeded returned objects were copyable, then the objects will not be returned and merely be deleted.

If you've done all of this and you believe you are still missing returned objects, please file a bug report inworld. Once youve submitted your bug, send an IM to Kona Linden inworld and provide him with your RT# from the email confirmation.

Big note on who to contact if you also ever suffer this issue: Kona Linden.

Excellent info to have when it seems no one is there to help. Too bad the help had to come from another resident and business owner who had suffered this same problem in the past rather than from Linden lab itself. I think that says a lot. Thank you again Cherry.

If anyone needs a copy of these notecards to pass around to anyone else with these issues, please do Im me in world.

30k objects in your inventory got coalesced into your Lost & Found folder?? /me looks confused.

Glad you got them back!

god I hate that thing. They created this "FEATURE' and then decided not to publicise its existance to everybody so it could SCREW WITH EM. Sure its written down at the bottom of some wiki pool somewhere, but ask ten SL players at random " WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE COALESCE FEATURE?" Not one of them will go 'WOOT'. Most will try to shrug. Most wont have a shrug because its stuck in a wall piece named 'object' that was coalesced in a mass item return and subsequently thrown into the TRASH by accident by the person who looked all over town and couldnt find it cus they NEVER HEARD OF A COALESCE BEFORE! !! *Kicks an electric sheep in frustration!

Wow!

First off Zoe, that is just fabulous that you got your stuff back. I love all of your things and we all would have lost had you not recovered them.

Zoe was one of the vendors that was gracious enough to replace some things that I purchased from her after LL decided to eat when they were mucking around with their database and didn't bother to tell anyone until the last townhall meeting last week.

So again, good for you.