OSgrid is planning a complete inventory reset on March 21, 2024.
That means that if you have an OSgrid avatar or region, you will have five weeks to make a backup of your inventory before everything is permanently deleted.
“All avatars that don’t have a backup of their OSgrid assets elsewhere within now and five weeks will irrevocably lose their complete inventory,” OSgrid secretary Foxx Bode told Hypergrid Business.
Not everything will be wiped, however. User avatars, friend lists, groups, and region locations will remain intact. However, all inventory items including photos, notecards, virtual objects, scripts, and landmarks will be erased during a week-long maintenance period.
The grid’s aging asset database had become a critical burden, with repair processes consuming resources meant for normal operations. Recent attempts to fix corrupted data made only 20% progress over four months.
OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid by land area, according to last month’s statistics, and the oldest grid in the OpenSim ecosystem. It was founded in 2007, meaning that there’s 18 years’ worth of accumulated stuff in the databases.
“The current database is a massive burden to the grid,” OSgrid administrators stated in their announcement. “Sixty percent of it is probably never used, and it kills the performance of our state-of-the-art hardware,”
Impact felt across OpenSim
The announcement triggered immediate migrations across OpenSim. Wolf Territories Grid reported over 100 new regions in recent days, while some smaller grids temporarily blocked incoming transfers to prevent system overload.
Wolf Territories was the most popular OpenSim grid as of last month.
“People have strong opinions and think the metaverse is some competition, but we really appreciate the help for our users,” Bode said, while warning smaller grids against accepting more users than their infrastructure could handle.
Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner highlighted his grid’s stable infrastructure amid the disruption.
“Kitely has been up since March 2011 and has never suffered asset server or inventory loss,” he said, pointing to the grid’s cloud-based system using Amazon S3 and CloudFront services. All content is backed up daily, he added.
Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.
Backup options
OSgrid users and residents have several options to secure their content.
First, there’s a marker on LBSA plaza with instructions on how to export your own avatar inventories as IAR files and entire regions as OAR files.
Second, if you have an avatar on another grid, you can open up two viewers and teleport that second avatar to the same place as your OSgrid avatar and just pass inventory items from one to the other.
Third, OSgrid is putting up some regions where people can create boxes to hold their stuff. These boxes will then go into OAR files.
Finally, as a last resort, the grid has an automated tool for exporting user inventories as an IAR file. This file can be uploaded to avatars on other grids, or re-uploaded back to OSgrid once the database reset is complete. However, OSgrid only has 20 slots a day for these backups, so the tool won’t be made publicly available.
If you need help with any of these, you can find in-world assistance from admins or greeters, or region hosts, including Unadecal, Prince, Paela, and Kristina. There is often someone around to help on the grid’s LBSA Plaza region, also known as the crossroads of the hypergrid.
It’s hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Lbsa Plaza.
OSgrid plans to resume operations March 28 with rebuilt database infrastructure. New user registration will remain closed until the process is completed.
Bode asked that users be considerate moving their stuff temporarily to other grids, especially smaller grid or free and open grids.
“Ask the grid owner upfront if its okay to load full regions or large inventories,” he said. “Not all grids have the capacity or means to process an influx of users with large inventories — and the storage consequences — and the very last thing we want is a domino effect of smaller grids suffering asset problems.”
“Personally, I’m very grateful the other big grids — amongst others Wolf and Alternate Metaverse jump to mind — are helping out with OSgrid‘s residents,” he added.
About OSgrid
Founded in 2007, OSgrid is one of the oldest and largest OpenSim virtual worlds. As a non-profit organization, it provides free land and resources to users, serving as a testing ground for OpenSim development and a hub for virtual communities.
The grid operates on open-source software and allows users to connect regions hosted on their own computers. This open architecture contributed to its growth but also led to challenges managing the accumulated data from nearly two decades of operation.
Meanwhile, the grid relies on donations to pay for its infrastructure and is run entirely by volunteers.
OSgrid has had problems before. In 2014 and 2015 the grid was down for several months and a significant number of assets were lost.
On a separate note
I won’t be doing a stats report this month, or in the foreseeable future. After all these years, I still haven’t found a way to fully automate the process and it takes a lot of manual work every month!
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