[Opensim-users] Question about IAR files

[Karen Palen]

You are correct that Second Inventory attempts to suck/blow (love the analogy!) through the user interface, as well as Meerkat and Emerald viewer.

There are at least a couple of "backup" tools that do attempt to save contents this way - NielLife viewer being the most popular right now, even if it is often used as an SL to SL piracy tool.

There is a lot of demand for something that works properly loading and saving OpenSim inventory though. A piracy tool need not bother about frequent errors and minor "fixes", but a legitimate backup or transfer tool needs to be virtually error free to be useful.

Neither Second Inventory nor Neillife handle the OpenSim interface very well at present - I suspect that this is the reason. 

The Niellife internal format is already XML so it should need only minor changes to generate a true IAR file. 

The SI "local drive" files are encrypted so there is no way to know.

I will post a copy of this to both blogs to see if maybe at least ONE of them will produce a workable backup/transfer tool for OpenSim!

Karen

--- On Mon, 2/22/10, Justin Clark-Casey <jjustincc at googlemail.com> wrote:
 
> Loading the IAR via "load iar" should have worked as well -
> I would suggest that you double check your password details
> first :)
> 
> IARs are one solution for this kind of data storage and
> they should remain compatible with future versions of
> OpenSim.  They have the advantage of probably being
> somewhat more reliable and quicker than solutions such as
> Second Inventory because they directly interface with the
> server rather than sucking/blowing through the client
> interface, which isn't built for that kind of thing.  
> 
> Of course, this also gives them the disadvantage of only
> working if you have region console access (though in
> principle somebody could put an interface on which allows
> non-region owners to load and save).
> 
> As well as second inventory, I know that some of the other
> SL clients (e.g. Imprudence, Meerkat) have inventory suck
> and blow built in and store data using a different file
> format.  I'm not sure what the current state of play is
> there - last time I looked the contents of items themselves
> were not being saved/restored.