[sldev] SL Database purge

[Sean Lynch]

Just to add to Soft's and Phoenix's explanations, the actual event that 
led to this was an earlier attempt to separate referenced assets from 
unreferenced ones that had some bugs. We never deleted any of the 
unreferenced assets, we just moved them to a different directory where 
they couldn't be reached. After this, we had a script called auditor 
running that would look for 404 errors on the asset servers and move the 
assets in question back into the "good" folder. Once we started working 
on rewriting the whole garbage collection system, we just moved these 
old "maybe garbage" assets back in with the rest. So there are no assets 
still missing because of this particular event.

For what should be obvious reasons, Linden Lab takes any bug that causes 
people to lose stuff *very* seriously. This does not mean we can develop 
a huge amount of support or developer time to each individual case of 
loss, because then we would not have any time left over to fix the root 
causes. Huge progress has been made in getting rid of the old causes of 
loss, but SL is a very complex system and the volume of transactions is 
growing, and every time someone loses an object, it's pretty annoying 
(or even devastating to them in some cases), so it's going to get a lot 
of attention, leading to the impression that nothing has changed with 
regard to inventory loss. This does not make it any less important for 
us to stomp out every single thing that can cause content loss and it 
does not diminish the heartbreak that each individual loss event causes.

Regarding backing stuff up to your hard drive, I believe there are open 
source efforts underway already to enable exporting of content you have 
mod permissions on for use on opensim and other alternative simulators; 
these same projects will presumably enable the re-import of such content 
to Second Life. As for things you don't have permissions to, as others 
have already pointed out, this would be difficult to implement without 
also making it easy to bypass permissions. This same dev time could (and 
I believe should) be spent eliminating remaining and newly invented 
causes of causes of content loss.

Thomas Grimshaw wrote:
> This from a friend:
>
> "Hi.  Not so great news, I'm afraid. I talked to the project manager 
> on Inventory Management, and was informed that on September 12, 2007, 
> they ran a program that collected unused objects and removed them from 
> the database. "Any older objects which [you] didn't rez between then 
> and early December (during which time they would have been 
> automatically recovered) could be candidates" for the category 
> "missing from database", and unfortunately are not recoverable. (This 
> is true for the 4 I tried to rez from my own inventory, as well -- and 
> no doubt many others.) That will apply anywhere in SL, not just your 
> own regions.  Rowan"
>
> How on earth can LL justify this? With no warning or announcement? 
> Don't worry folks, just rez your entire inventory every 2 months and 
> you won't lose anything..
>
> ~Tom
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