I have several friends who have lost lots of their inventory recently, one lost all of her shapes skins, etc, and Linden Labs was only able to restore one of them, at least it was the best looking one. Ina blog post on the Second Life blog, Hamilton Linden discusses the Inventory Loss Reduction Initiative, which contains several internal projects like Metrics Instrumentation, Region Crash Reduction, Asset Collection Improvement, Bug Fixing, Resident Reported Inventory Loss Analysis, Architectural Enhancements, and Perceived Inventory Loss.

How are they planning on doing it? Read on…

Metrics Instrumentation - For this project we are adding much more precise logging of error codes throughout the entire system for inventory rez, derez and transfers, as well as other system processes including teleport errors. For those not familiar with this terminology, in this context: rezzing is the act of taking an object out of your inventory and placing it in a Region, and derezzing is the reverse act of taking an item from a Region and placing it in your inventory.

Region Crash Reduction - Residents sometimes experience data loss during region crashes. This is especially true if a Resident rezzes a no-copy item and then the Region has to rollback to a previous checkpoint. Currently, 8% of all Residents sessions are terminated because of region crashes and rolling restarts. While most of these region crashes are able to recover without a rollback or data loss, we know this number is unacceptable.

Asset Collection Improvement - When an asset is no longer in any Residents’ inventory and not rezzed in any Region, then we collect it and set aside for deletion. However, because it is a very complex problem to determine which assets are not being used, there are cases where we accidentally collect an asset, which is still in someone’s inventory. Fortunately, we have a program that is watching and puts the item back in your inventory within an hour if we still have it. So next time you get this error, do be sure to check back in an hour. Source: Inventory Loss Reduction Initiative

Much more to read there in that post about the bug fixes, architectural enhancements and loss analysis, they also mention there is perceived inventory loss, where the item is not actually lost, residents just need to clear their cache and relog, and the steps are:

Go to Edit > Preferences on the menu bar
Click the Network tab
Click the Clear Cache button
Exit Second Life
Log back into Second Life
Wait in place for 5 minutes; Second Life needs to reload much of your previously cached information.

Be sure to check the Inventory Recovery Steps on the wiki.

If you have further questions or would like to discuss this blog post inworld, they will be holding an office hour at Longfellow at 56, 146, 25 on 2007-10-17 @ 2 PM PDT.

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