Socially|Mundane

Does this get your attention?:

"I have for a few months been testing an internal tool which allows you to export a OpenSim Archive from a Second Life Region..."

These are the words of Adam Frisby.

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.

Adam discusses the idea of a "Wayback Grid", something to the effect of the "Wayback Machine" that allows you to see (attempted) archives of web sites from years ago. For example, take a look at Google today and compare it with Google of, say November 1998 .



Unfortunately as Adam writes, a lot of content on Second Life is lost forever. That's more or less the whole idea behind and where the reference to "Burning Man" comes from: the art is temporary.

However, in all of this, a way to back-up and archive entire Second Life regions and their content is a wonderful and terrible at the same time idea and discovery. Think of what would happen if this technology got into the wrong hands.

All of the shrill diatribe and nonsense whining so many unthinking, irrational whiners to any change Linden Lab makes to the grid about the "failure of business" and the 'collapse' of the Second Life economy would, in fact come to pass and in the fashion of a tidal-wave, wreaking havoc and laying waste the entire grid.

Fortunately, Adam seems to be on the moral high-ground regarding what he is able to accomplish:

Before anyone asks, the modifications arent public - unfortunately for every legitimate user for a tool like this, theres 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 - well see what my schedule looks like in the next few weeks).

[From  Adam Frisby blog]

Art: Adam Frisby