Where'd my prims go?

[Ultra Lisa]

A couple weeks ago when I logged on I found I had lost several hundred prims and many items had been returned to me in bulk. I always maintain at least a hundred prim cushion so I was baffled. Today after a restart I got 350 prims back , what gives? I live on Benicia sim, mainland.

[Rolig Loon]

If you have a whole pile of objects returned at once, the answer is usually that you (or someone) just rezzed a lot of things that forced the land temporarily over its L.I. limit.  The servers shouldn't let that happen -- they ought to prevent people from rezzing too many things for the land -- but they can get overwhelmed by a rapid set of requests.  Griefers take advantage of that sometimes.  With the new region L.I. limits it's harder to do, but a dedicated griefer with a replicator can still rez a lot of things very fast.  The servers compensate by returning other things to make room.  After an attack like that, a region owner can sometimes convince Linden Lab to restore the entire region to an earlier state, so that all the returned items suddenly reappear.  It's hard to know if that's what happened to your region, but it's a possibility.  After all, on the Mainland, the region owner is LL.

[Ultra Lisa]

Thank you for your answer, but yesterday I had 124 prims available, today I have 474. Yet I have not taken anything off my land. My prim allowance is just over 2900. Something strange going on, these prims returned after restart.

[Rolig Loon]

Yes, the sequence of events I described would do that.  As I said, if Linden Lab rolled back the region, you could easily recover the objects that were lost before.  This sort of thing has happened in the past and may be more common now.  If someone on your region changes the physics shape type of a complex object (for example, converting a prim object that's based on a torus or on tortured prims into a Convex Hull shape) its L.I. can jump suddenly from 20 or 30 to several hundred.  That can force the servers to return a huge pile of objects elsewhere on the region and can make your available L.I. drop like a stone even though you did nothing at all in your own parcel.  When Linden Lab sees what happened and rolls the region back, your L.I. will return miraculously to normal again.

Edited March 21, 2017 by Rolig Loon
Added clarification

[Lindal Kidd]

Note that prims don't (usually) just vanish.  They may be returned to you, however, either by autoreturn or by a landowner or other person with return privileges.  Check your Lost and Found folder.  Bulk returns will generally show up as a "coalesced object" with the inventory symbol of a stack of little cubes.  These can contain up to a couple hundred objects.  Find a large open area to rez it, and have your Edit window open BEFORE you rez it.  This will make it easier to move it if needed to get everything above ground level.

[Bobbie Faulds]

Unfortunately, if there was a jump in prims or a griefer, the land settings don't return last rezzed first returned but will return randomly. I've been on several RP sims that, because of needing rezzing open for bullets, griefers have taken advantage of that and large portions of the sim builds have disappeared. 

BTW, look in your lost and found and see if you have objects that look like a lot of little boxes together. If so, that's where your stuff it. It was returned in a coalesced object. You'll need to be sure you are in a place with enough prims and space then rez those out as they will rez out in the relationships they were when they were returned. Good luck.

Edited March 26, 2017 by Bobbie Faulds