Grid Yuck & Insurance

Today's prolonged Grid Yuck (of which I fortunately missed the bulk of the "fun" as indicated in my previous post) generated quite a few blog posts (like from Snickers Snook and Glorf Bulmer) and a discussion in the Second Life Bloggers group, including a mention by me of my occasional campaign to have property insurance for when the Grid's problems cause an Inventory loss. I've written a couple times about this idea (see here) and it's time I make the call again ...

Nocciola the dragon, resting on my shoulder at the Lydia Rose Memorial Park (SLurl). I haven't replaced all the dragons I lost to Grid Yuck years ago, but I do have a few and I still think they are some of SL greatest pets.

The Lab should make available property insurance, perhaps as a Premium account benefit. Read anyone's Terms of Service and you'll see that no provider — be it a cloud storage company, a game publisher, or whatever — can guarantee 100% safety for a user's data (and our Inventories are just that: data). But if I'm willing to pay more than a base user pays, why shouldn't better data integrity be a benefit? Regular backups on Linden Servers could even be a revenue stream.

Insurance and Folder Perms and Backups

Recent events and a discussion of the SL asset permission system on Tatero Nino's blog Dwell On It (Web) has got me thinking once again (earlier post) that some sort of insurance system should be developed to protect against inventory loss. The event: A club I was building disappeared from my inventory. The in-world copy was deleted to conserve prims and now only one link set remains, some carefully adjusted curtains. Maybe the cause was some form of stupidity on my part. Some recent health issues have left me not entirely "here," so to speak. But if the cause was similar to my previous losses then I'll be well and truly upset.

At one time I owned nearly every dragon pet made by Winx Whiplash, beautiful L$400 creatures that captured my heart the first time I saw them. The collection took nearly two years to build and it disappeared over night. Along with an expensive and now unobtainable riding unicorn and dozens upon dozens of other critters, avatars, and other objects from a variety of folders. My Wryms dragons were copyable and I had the backups. Same with some other objects, but the dragons were gone. All the standard recovery methods failed and I was without my pets or the funds to replace them.

If this had been Real Life some homeowner's insurance would have covered the property loss and I'd have the cash to rebuild the herd. Sure, I'd have to prove the loss and there would be paperwork, but eventually my losses would be made whole. Why can't there be insurance inSL?

For one, it would require the cooperation of The Lab, and their acquisition of XStreet leads me to believe they'd rather have us spend money to replace assets than to use resources to recover or replace them. Actually, the arrangement could be a boon if there was a way to verify that an asset was no longer in the databases (think UUID) then a requested replacement could be sent via Xstreet in a manner much like the Midnight Mania prize redelivery system developed by Shep Korvin.

Secondly, planning for schemers and hackers would mean considerable investment in a secure system. I don't believe The Lab would be willing to work with someone to do this even if a turn-key solution was provided. Again, it would not be to the benefit of The Lab if they are not convinced it is a serious issue. And would you want to admit that your servers lose inventory?

Maybe The Lab could be convinced to let users set permissions on our folders and assets. The folders for Objects or Scripts, for example, can't be deleted. I would love to have the ability to set "can't delete" on folders I've created or even on individual items in a folder. It wouldn't be fool proof (there are too many talented fools) and it wouldn't prevent on-server losses, but it's an idea.

Or maybe The Lab could implement backups. Everything that I have with full C/M/T permissions is eventually copied to an Alt I created for storage. Same for things that I can transfer and but seldom use. This has helped on a few occasions, but won't solve the problem with losing No Trans assets. Here is a chance for The Lab to make some more money: Backups for Premium accounts. Just a thought. I have two premium accounts and my brother has a third. That is $216USD per year they get from our household. Some value-added consideration would be nice.

New Cow Avie & Thoughts on Insurance

Willowbay Destiny makes some cute cow avies in association with AnthroXtacy (Web) so I had to get one (SLurl). Purple spots and hair, of course, as My Love likes that color. It is full Copy/Mod and this picture shows some of the mods I've already made like the white horns and streak-free hair. I'll do a few other mods, too, when I have the time. Probaby different hair styles and some jewelry. It comes some nice t-shirts and a good pair of shorts plus a couple funny gestures. Rezzing the box it comes in is fun, too. I did it several times for laughs before unpacking and then taking it back into my inventory for storage.

I especially like that it is full Copy so I can keep the original box in storage for if I accidentally delete a part, change one beyond repair, or (Heaven forbid) I have another massive inventory loss due to the ineptitude of Linden Labs^® to maintain database integrity. Holiday decorations, a dozen Wynx dragons, AKK horses, clothes ... I figured about L$20,000 of No Copy goods over the last year, all gone. So backups are good. I have tried commercially available inventory boxes (SLurl to the Thinc store for the box I have) to store items, thus reducing inventory, and the 'stuff a prim' idea promoted by the first edition of Second Life: The Official Guide (Web) only to find that the items no longer show in the database. The same book also recommends creating an alt to store your Transferable items.

That inventory could get borked, too, so once again I dream of Inventory Insurance. After all, you can buy insurance for your belongings in Real Life (iRL) so why not in Second Life^®, too? Determining fault for loss would be hard, sure, and documenting the original purchases would likely mean giving up information that some would consider private. Maybe someone out there has pockets deep enough to try this, though.