Adam did not want to see creative work being vanished at Second Life when sims were shut down. He wrote a piece of software to save a whole region to be able to bring it back up at an Opensim world.
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.