Missing inventory…
**** Before I go on my discussion I’d like to say that my experience with Linden Lab tech support was relatively stellar. Maggie and Frontier are great. It’s too bad that I couldn’t get my stuff back. ****
Last week sometime I went to put on an outfit from Last Call. I needed to look at how something fit. I love that there are so many wonderful content creators in Second Life but I owned over 100 of Ginny’s items because I liked the way they fit my fat butt. Some stuff now is harder to fit due to resize scripts or just how they are designed. While searching for Last Call in my inventory I found nothing.
I searched for “LC”. Nothing.
I searched for “Starley” (I have that outfit). Nothing.
By now I was getting furious. Just a few days before this I was making something for a plurker when I noticed one of my textures I made was missing. Actually I am going to be completely honest. Since coming back to Second Life after my 6 month break I’ve discovered *a lot* of things missing. But I don’t really complain because they are things I created and I can reupload. Anyway, with this texture missing I tried to do Ctrl+alt+shift+t and get the texture off a prim I had textured and that didn’t work (A big screw you to whoever decided that feature must go- I use that ALL the time) so I had to download Meerkat and back up my prim object and out of the xml grab the texture UUID and then use LLSetTexture (Note to Linden Lab: if this goes I will throw an e-fit) to texture the prims for my socks. What a fricken hassle.
But back to the present time where I was getting slightly upset over the fact that every Last Call item I owned was gone. Every.One. I do a quick mental flip through my recent activity as I seem to recall seeing my Last Call folders and sure enough, on Sept 7th I wrote a blog post at Virtual Fatshionista wearing a Last Call item.
So at that point I follow my own advice (it’s even in my picks of my profile). I clear cache. Log off. Log into beta grid. Wait. DO NOT DO A THING. Load up inventory. Nothing.
I close the client. Remove my user folder and uninstall the client. Go to the wiki. Reinstall Second Life and log into the recommended Sim. It’s some underwater thingy. Load inventory. Nothing.
I then go ahead and decide I’ve been premium for over 2 years now I’m going to use Chat. Maggie tries to help me but alas my stuff isn’t back so she requests I file a ticket.
I file a ticket and the next morning the ticket is closed with the wiki article attached. You know, that kind of aggravates me but what can I do? I figure I will follow the directions to the letter.
No inventory.
I reopen the ticket and the next morning I see emails stating my accounts been taken over, logged in, given back to me. Then taken over again, and logged in, and given back to me. A little after that I get an email that said the ticket was closed and there’s nothing they can do but my stuff is gone. Ok at this point I’m over it. What can I really do? Right? My account has always been wacky. Originally I wasn’t properly tied to Jira. I filed a bug report and it seemed ‘invisible’. My husband had to get someone to fix it proper. After that my account didn’t carry over to the vivox database for voice and I had to get Joe Linden to fix my problem (others had it as well- for a while we were the 401 Unauthorized club). So since I’ve rezzed I’ve been used to weird account issues.
Well as the day progresses I am at work and we have to do some updates to some databases and I got to thinking.
“When is it socially acceptable to constantly lose data from a database?”
That’s large and centered for a reason! IT IS NEVER SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE but for some reason I, and many other residents, have gotten what I laughingly call “Windows Syndrome” with Second Life inventory loss. Windows Syndrome is essentially when you open some program and it crashes for no good reason and your IT person is like, “That just happens” and suddenly things just don’t work right sometimes and it’s just ‘how it is’. That’s not how an operating system should work and I certainly don’t think it’s acceptable if I just told my real estate assessors that “oh we just lost some data from the tax database, but don’t worry I will continue to investigate why data loss occurs”. I would be fired before you could say, “oh Hell no”.
I realize that the asset database is large and massive. So is the US Social Security database. For the last 18 years they’ve been able to keep records of my yearly salary and payments without losing a penny and I know this as a fact since they mail me every year a little summary and I check from year to year. My grandfather has a social security number issued the day they were issued and until the day he died (in his 80s) they sure didn’t lose a penny of salary he made and they didn’t have computers back in the late 30s.
While it may be unfair to compare that database to the asset database I still think it is completely unacceptable to lose inventory at the frequency residents do. PERIOD.
While I am not a premium member I can tell you I had a very similar experience recently I went to wear a top from Sn@tch and nothing was in the folder except the folders I had used to sort the different colors. So I cleared cashe reloged into a water sim, then deleted everything reinstalled logged into the beta grid, They took over my account I found out via email. then they closed the ticket. I had a mentor who helped me after my ticket was closed and I tried everything no matter how outlandish from changing my home location to changing the folder SL would use for cashe. Nothing ever returned if anything I have found more and more things missing. I feel for you and agree when should this ever be acceptable we paid REAL money for these items and when they poof they just says sorry it happens deal with it.
I feel for you,
Sanura Snowpaw
November 4th, 2009 at 12:32 am
This has happened to me too. I think the most FRUSTRATING part is when they tell you to do all the things that you KNOW you should because you’ve done them so many times before. And you say so in your ticket. And they tell you to do them again anyway. Agreed. It’s unacceptable.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:47 am
I’ve long supported the need for property/inventory insurance and have blogged about it (like here http://poultryreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/insurance-and-folder-perms-and.html). I’m still building back the my biggest inventory loss and have found yet another. LL really hates Halloween stuff in my possession. The fact that I’m a Premium member helps when there is a problem, but it is not a guarantee.
November 4th, 2009 at 12:50 am
I lost an entire Huddles FULL of expensive animations, and the “house” folder in my inventory, containing, sigh….I don’t even want to think about how much “house” stuff was in there. Seems when you go for support and such, if you can’t resolve it on your own, it’s just not going to be resolved.
November 4th, 2009 at 1:31 am
OK, this is neither a big nor tragic loss, but I have an alt, Brutus Magnifico, that I used to use for Roman RP. Well, at the time, he had lots of togas and such, but only one “normal” outfit. He was wearing it when he logged off. I could see it on the opening screen when he logged back on. But his t-shirt was gone, gone from inventory, gone from his body. The only shirt he had was stolen right off his back!
November 4th, 2009 at 2:15 am
Oh this is a big “deja vu” moment indeed. I had this same problem recently which I blogged about here http://ramblingwithrors.blogspot.com/2009/10/its-sad-day-in-sl-today.html Unfortunately my experience with the LL Live Chat was none too helpful. Neither were the subsequent 6 emails back and forth with another Support Officer at LL. In the end, I gave up all hope of ever getting my items back. It wasn’t just one folder though….I lost just about everything! Good luck to those who have this problem and in getting their inventory back. It’s a long, and very costly process in getting all those items again. And some are not able to be re bought as they were one offs. I sympathise with you whole heartedly.
November 4th, 2009 at 3:17 am
I had that happen to me months ago when I decided that all my stuff I wanted to keep but not up my inventory to 40,000 in boxes. Welllll when I went to get those out POOF all gone…. I guess things like that have made me stop playing after almost four years… Yay LL !! tysm for all you’ve done.
November 4th, 2009 at 3:33 am
As odd as it sounds, sometimes a different viewer helps, I have had friends lost tens of thousands of things, and suggested they install and log in Snowglobe and it has worked.
Worth a try
xoxSasyxox
November 4th, 2009 at 6:01 am
I heard boxed stuff is best kept rezzed on a (mainland) sim, since long-unused stuff in the inventory sometimes gets “garbage collected”.
November 4th, 2009 at 6:28 am
My boyfriend had the exact same experience. Lost a few thousand items. Went through the necessary hoops to get it back, to no avail. He talked to LL, and they apparently said he deleted something in his inventory called “object” and when he did, it pulled other items labeled as such as well. Now, we both know this is not the case since he lost tons of his building materials, none of which were cheap…or labeled ‘object’.
November 4th, 2009 at 7:52 am
If what Peter says is true then I am in some kind of trouble, I have stuff in my inventory I never even opened. I understand the feeling, I have had my favorite shoe folder gone missing before and my heart started pounding and my stomach flip flopping as my head tried to tell me its just pixels. I have always gotten my stuff back doing the vowel thing after clearing cache and logging in to a empty sim or beta sim. I have been lucky, sometimes I kinda wish I would loose some so I could even consider the thought of organizing it. LOL
November 4th, 2009 at 8:00 am
I’m still crying about my entire Truth folder disappearing mysteriously one day…
November 4th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
The sad thing is that the Last Call stuff isn’t replaceable. I have lost some of mine too as did a friend of mine.
November 4th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
I’ve been noticing more and more that some of my item have been missing lately too. The problem is I’m not sure how long they’ve been gone.
It’s been frustrating though as I’ve been working on setting up a shop and I’m missing several clothing textures and a few older items I had made.
Extremely frustrating. Especially since I can’t find those clothing textures on my HD either.
I can’t imagine the asset server is anything but a complete mess. I hear people all the time talking about 10,000+ inventories, often MUCH MUCH more.
Too many copies of freebies of crap floating around.
I had a great idea that could possibly help alleviate some of this clutter. “Outfit Aliased”. Basically, a new tab in the inventory. You can say “Item X from folder Y + Item Z in folder A” Make an outfit. One item can be in more than one outfit. This way you don’t have to make copies.
Also the ability to do things like “find duplicate items” and junk like that.
Basically, the inventory management system needs a severe overhaul so people can start sorting the junk out.
November 13th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Just to follow up on an old post again…
I found my stuff!
I had sorted a bunch of junk into storage boxes so it wasn’t taking up space in my inventory!
November 13th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I have found that trying another viewer works. I was using emerald when I noticed over half my inventory 3/4ths more like was missing… I went back to the regular viewer and it was all there … though using the emerald one again I canr seem to see it all…
I will try a few more things but I guess for now I can’t use my favorite viewer while working
December 7th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Kittenz: You have to separate the cache folder for Emerald from the regular viewer. http://modularsystems.sl/index.php?option=com_agora&task=topic&id=913&Itemid=2
The problem with my incident here was LL did a purge which basically removes objects from unused inventories- so my objects must have been marked for removal.
Hoep this helps!
December 7th, 2009 at 3:58 pm