Somewhere in the deep dark recesses of my backup server, is a little directory called ‘AWSERVER’, last modified circa 1999. Inside that directory is my world database and the content path associated with my old ActiveWorlds regions. With a little (or maybe a lot) of work, I could probably re-load it today and log in.Yet, if I tried to revisit some of my full-sim creations in Second Life from 2004, I’d have a lot of trouble trying – I’d need to recover what I could from my inventory and do painstaking rebuilding work, if it was possible at all.

This is the problem with SL – the moment something is deleted, or a region is shut down – it’s almost always gone forever. If you wanted to revisit a earlier incarnation of Nexus Prime, or parts of SL’s ancient history – you are out of luck, as there’s a very solid chance those places are simply irrecoverable and lost to the sands of time. As digital data, there should be no good reason for this – disk space is cheap, and sims are small.

The classic case of this is the Bedazzle sims, among them were Gravity Space Station, Chinatown and UnrealSL – but none of them lasted more than between a few weeks or a few months. I’m digressing here slightly; but there are major projects I have been involved in SL that I would love to be able to still access that are gone forever (earlier versions of Aleph, the Atlas Underwater Complex, etc).

The problem isn’t so much that SL doesn’t store ancient rollbacks but that it is simply not possible to save a copy of one; even if you are the rights owner and want to back up your own work. Second Inventory can help here, but it too has flaws – it doesn’t have any kind of mass restore functionality; and it can only save inventory – there’s no chance to save the layout within a region, only the individual contents of it.

It is somewhat sad to see regions shut down by their owners for affordability reasons; knowing full well that the content cannot be ever easily restored later – I personally hate to see it when this happens, because something creative is lost forever.

OpenSim on the other hand, has some real advantages here – I have complete copies of a lot of my builds on OpenSim in varying stages of construction, courtesy of the Region Archive functionality. Every major construction project I have done on any of the grids is sitting somewhere on one of my hard disks as a .tar.gz file containing everything needed to reload it in later. In OpenSim, nothing is ever incapable of being saved – at all times you can dump a copy of the region to a disk, then reload it later somewhere else.

As a creator it’s fairly liberating – and convenient. I can work on a sim locally, export it, then import it into the production environment, and vice versa, take a production environment for local tweaks, edit it, then bring it back again.

Backing up Aleph

I have for a few months been testing an internal tool which allows you to export a OpenSim Archive from a Second Life Region – it was originally developed to export a clients region (their IP); but ended up being handy to preserve some of our workshops and builds from deletion when we closed the sims or rebuilt them. Today, I rewrote it – the previous version was based on the old libomv PrimWorkshop viewer, the new version is now based on the Simian Periscope (Periscope is a kind of multi-user version of GridProxy).

Before anyone asks, the modifications aren’t public – unfortunately for every legitimate user for a tool like this, there’s ten asshats prepared to use it as copybot deluxe, so the source is going to stay private (although I might release a binary version containing creator and permission checks similar to Second Inventory – we’ll see what my schedule looks like in the next few weeks).

This new version is overall a bit more reliable – a number of small bugs and niggles got fixed along the way – but the key factor is it’s now not a 2 hour effort to run, a region can be grabbed with 95%+ accuracy in minutes. You can see here, my personal workshop region ‘Aleph’ in Second Life – it’s a fairly old sim, but it’s gone through a ton of revisions in it’s history. The current revision is a sort of moonbase cross sandbox, complete with orbital lasers.

Aleph Null

Below you can see the same region and contents, but in my personal standalone OpenSim region. This one is located on my personal desktop – but with the same OAR file, I could just as easily reload it on any region running any version of OpenSim since OAR support was added. If I wanted to bring Aleph to OSGrid, it would take only as long as it took to copy and load the file on a region connected to OSGrid.

127.0.0.1:9000

There are limitations, the tool doesn’t copy any form of ‘deep inspection’ – so scripts, etc do not get saved. It’s theoretically possible however to back these up if you are the object owner, something I will be looking at in the future. Estate settings and a few other features aren’t in the v1 OAR format, so those also need to be recreated – but could be something we look at adding in future. It’s also worth noting that it will only backup content with a creator tag in a specified list; while that limit could be removed, it provides an easy way of assuring that you are backing up only content you have rights to.

The Wayback Grid

One of the projects I would like to see would be some kind of opt-in mechanism to subscribe to an automatic backup service similar to Archive.org for the web – the goal of which would be preservation of content in the long run. When someone drops their region, it would be nice to be able to restore it later on if they buy another region, or move to one of the open grids.

Ultimately, this could be taken to an extreme where you can dial back a grid in time, and see it as it was in a previous point in time – however the biggest limitations here are dealing with content prosciption. Most SL content is licensed with one or more restrictions – ethically ‘no copy’ is probably a blocker to performing backups, likewise ‘no transfer’ makes some implications about bringing something out of SL. To do this effectively, you need massive ‘opt-in’ by content creators to approve their content going outside.

The easiest starting point is instead probably to provide some kind of service for creators to voluntarily backup their sims (say, in the case of a creator shutting down their region – but wanting to preserve it). Perhaps there are options here to look at providing some kind of transfer service for people moving regions from say SL to OSGrid [providing they own the copyright]. If anyone is interested in that kind of service, let me know – this might be useful for folks contemplating migrating over to OpenSim/OSGrid and have all their own content.