Easy way to back up own textures?

[Icarus Lytton]

Basically, I decided I've had it with SL's slow way of dealing with textures so I got the idea to export all my textures and using Adobe Bridge to tag and sort through them instead, and dumping all my textures in folders A to Z and then just searching by name.

The problem is, I have thousands of textures and exporting them is very tedious because I have to open one at a time - isn't there a faster way to do this?

[Ceera Murakami]

Not really, no. SL is incredibly backward in that regard. The only way it supports texture export is one texture at a time.

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Though I've not exported many textures in my SL lifetime I, too, wondered why you can only do it one at a time.  Since, most of my textures are ones that I've made myself, they are all saved to my second hard drive anyway so I haven't worried much about it.  But thinking back when I did wonder, I remember having the thought that maybe the one at a time restriction was intentional.  Intentional because of the bandwidth that multiple saves back to someone's hard drive could be quite a lot.  LL's servers have a huge demand put on them just to deliver all the textures and assets everyone's viewers are requesting (I mean a very huge demand......I can't imagine how much bandwidth the servers require to deliver all the content in SL to everyone who's logged in at any given moment).  If someone has "thousands of textures" they want to save back to their computer and, say, can saved in batches of a 100 (or more) how is that going to effect others in-world?  The servers are going to have use bandwidth for all those exports while at the same time keep delivering content to everyone's viewers........I can see where that could lag a region (or even the whole grid) quite a lot.  The outcry from the users would be tremendous (remember, most people don't export textures).  We all would be screaming about those unexplained lag spikes........and justifibly so.

 

I guess they could allow some multiple texture exports but they would have to trottle the process to keep the bandwidth reasonable.  That introduces a new potential area of dissatisfaction for the people who want to export a few (maybe only one) texture..........it's going to be slow.  It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.  So perhaps the one at a time restriction just may be the best solution.  And it may be intentional.  All this is just my thoughts from a year or so ago when I exported about 10 textures back to my computer.........I could be wrong but it makes sense to me.

[Icarus Lytton]

Too bad - I broke my mouse earlier from all the clicking and gave up. With textures being the heart and soul of designing, it's pretty bad :matte-motes-crying:

[Peggy Paperdoll]

Yes textures are the heart and soul of designing (without them nothing would look like anything).  And LL does provide for multiple texture uploads (imports).  The up side to that is that any bandwidth excesses are on the uploader.  Going back the other way the bandwidth excesses are on the SL servers (no one else suffers because someone wants to download (export) a thousand or two textures).  It's fair as far as I can tell.  I can see why you don't like it if you have a ton of textures you want to transfer to your computer but think of all the people who would also not like it because you are exporting a gig or two of textures and their SL slows to a crawl.  It's inconvenient for you but it's not just you LL has to think about.

[Jenni Darkwatch]

There are many ways to get textures in bulk out of SL, but I think most (all?) of them are banned by LL even if it's your own textures. One hint: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Texture_Cache

[Morgaine Christensen]

I think you use to be able to use Second Inventory to save your textures to a hard drive...not sure that is available  anymore.  You had to be careful they were your creations; I don't think it sorted by creator.  The last time I tried to use SI like 2-3 years ago, it was very tedious and cumbersome.  Better than one at a time but very slow.  I think I trashed it over the years. 

[Rufus Darkfold]

Certainly the easiest way to back up your own textures is to keep the originals on your computer and back them up there.

"Your own" in this case means that you created them.   If you obtained them from someone else, you are not allowed to export them at all, even if they are full-permissions, according to the Second Life terms of service.   Any tool that automatically exported your entire texture folder would be in violation of the ToS, which is why there aren't any.

Retrieving your own-created textures from SL would be sub-optimal anyway, as they would likely have undergone some format conversion.  SL uses JPEG2000 internally, but how many of us actually create our textures in that format?

I would only retrieve one of my textures from SL as a last resort, in the event that I had somehow lost the original.

 

[Shelby Silverspar]

and you can't sort through them, rename and organize a - z inworld why?

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I keep my textures in an organizer.  One copy of the organizer in my inventory for daily use and also one in world inside a prim (actually some furniture) on two different sims as a backup against inventory loss or sim crash.  Have never lost a texture yet this way.

A texture organizer that does not require you to rename or tag textures is what you need for sorting.  I have one that I have been very satisfied with created by Gaunt Gabe.  When I bought this I had tens of thousands of textures.  It wasn't a one day project to get them all sorted but it was a LOT faster than doing it inside inventory and its a breeze to add and sort new textures I acquire.