Backup/Restore functionality - a customer service win and a potential LL cash stream

[roiafblackgoat]

I'm currently planning an operation that has me terrified - selecting and moving an entire, large sim build. The logical first part of the plan that came to mind is "back up your work first!". I'm going to put in a ticket with LL and see if this can be arranged in case of disaster when I do (but I have a sinking feeling the answer will be no). Its something any coder, developer or graphic artist would do in any other format, but we have no way to do it in SL.

It strikes me as a giant hole in LL's service that they aren't offering backup/restore capability to sim owners yet. Storage no longer costs and arm and a leg and it would offer a level of service that would give users peace of mind -AND- reduce frustrating interactions with support on both sides of the equation.

I'd be willing to pay $20 per month to have a backup button on my account page and a listing of however many backups I was paying to keep at a time that I could click to do a restore. Failing that, I'd pay $2 - $5 USD a piece for manual backups if I had the ability to restore them.

Unless there are a lot of things besides a technician's time that have to happen for a restore to take place, I can't think of a single downside to turning this into an automated process for sim owners. 

 

 

[Whirly Fizzle]

You could use the "Restore to last position" feature in Firestorm viewer that makes moving entire regions worth of builds a breeze.

As long as you have rez rights at on the 0,0,0 parcel  on the new region it will work just fine.

Simply pick up (or take a copy of) the builds on the old region - you can shift select & take/take copy of coalesced chunks too.

Then on the new region, right click each build in inventory -> Restore to last position.

The objects will rez at the exact same location they were in on the previous region.

Only word of caution is if you have no copy content that you need to restore.

I'd advise placing the no copy content manually as in certain rare cases, no copy content can be lost if you use restore to last position.  The viewer will actually block you using restore to last position on no copy content.

However, for the brave, you can allow no copy content to be restored by setting the debug setting AllowNoCopyRezRestoreToWorld to TRUE.  However, do so at your own risk.

[roiafblackgoat]

Unfortunately, this doesn't work if your 'risky manuever' is actually trying to move the entire build over a bit and nothing has been returned or picked up.  Restore to last position is great, but it doesn't work for everything.

[Qie Niangao]

In order to make this satisfactory for broad use, it would be almost unimaginably complex to implement, and the problem is with the "Copy" permission that should never have been possible to limit. Gachas, breedables, and other such niche markets notwithstanding, everything in SL should have been copiable without limit from the very beginning, and then this functionality would have been a natural.

As it stands, however, any such feature would have to either exclude no-copy items from the backup (not "satisfactory for broad use") or arrange that an in-world instance of a specific no-copy item automatically destroys any other instances of the same no-copy item ("unimaginably complex to implement" because it means the provenance of every single no-copy instance would need to be separately tracked and managed when rezzed -- with obvious storage costs and lag effects to offset somehow).

"Unimaginably complex" isn't the same as impossible, of course, but it would be hundreds of thousands of USD to develop along with substantial incremental operations cost whether the feature is ever used or not, with very little chance of making back anything like that amount of investment.

Now, if Sansar doesn't support no-copy content, it could do this, no problem.