The Second Life paradigm is such a part of the way I view virtual worlds and I am “unlearning” many things that I thought “just were”. In Second Life, if you blow away a month long build by accident (speaking from experience? sadly yes), you can call Live Chat at Linden Lab and request a region rollback. Typically this means waiting eight hours and being restored to some point in the last 24 hours.
This would be fine if you had a sim that was entirely yours. However, if there are others on your sim, you need to check with them if they placed anything on the sim. Any items placed after the last restore point will be gone.
With Reaction Grid, you have your own server and it is your grid. The Level 2 Venue grid is tiny at 4 sims, but it is its own grid nevertheless. As such, it is up to you to create your own restore points. These backups can become large and consume your grid’s hard drive space in a heartbeat.
Now I would not consider myself overly techie. Some things I know very well – like Flash – I even ran my own Flash forum for about four years. but when it comes to a remote desktop session with a server, SQL 2008, maybe some C# (or flat?), and OAR files, it’s new territory for me.
I create my backups in two forms – one as OAR files (that is everything on a single sim, from terrain, to land division, to trees and buildings) and a SQL backup of the full grid. I then zip these files and then open an FTP connection with the iliveisl website host (a reseller account). This turns out to be a very fast way to move my backup files to a password protected folder on my Level 2 Venue website within the iliveisl account where I have a lot of disk space. I can then download those locally, or leave them available to myself online.
While none of this is Earth shattering, it was a neat exercise not possible with Second Life. And it provides a lot of peace of mind by allowing me to have what I create. These files could be deployed on other OpenSim grids, including on my own machine.
That’s a really nice option – work locally on a sim project and load the OAR files whenever you like.
I even understand that you can run OpenSim on a flash drive! Now how cool is that?
