Inventory loss

COMMON CAUSES AND SOLUTIONS

Clearing Second Life’s cache

Second Life uses hard drive space on your computer to store data, including a list of items in your inventory. If this cache becomes corrupted, items in your inventory may erroneously appear to be missing. In many cases, your items are not lost and will reappear after you clear Second Life’s cache:

• 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.

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[IMAGE] Preferences window, Clear Cache button highlighted

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Region issues

The Region you are in may be experiencing technical difficulties, especially in high traffic areas. This behavior can prevent you from rezzing items from your inventory. If you are unable to escape to another Region, exit Second Life and log back into a different Region:

• Go to Edit > Preferences on the menu bar
• Click the General tab
• Turn on the option “Show Start Location on Login Screen”
• Exit Second Life
• Launch Second Life, but don’t connect yet
• Enter “Sandbox Newcomb”, or another known Region name, into Start Location
• Click Connect

Try to find a Region with a low Traffic score and relatively few objects- such Regions generally experience less strain, and are less likely to exhibit symptoms like inventory loss.

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[IMAGE] Login screen, highlight Sandbox Newcomb entered into Start Location

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SEARCH TECHNIQUES

Did the objects vanish after being returned?

The Coalesce feature may cause confusion by making it appear that objects have vanished instead of being returned to your inventory. When a group of objects gets returned, they are merged into a single, coalesced object. This object is then placed back into your inventory, in your Lost and Found folder.

For example, imagine you have a living room. Inside the living room there is a television, coffee table, sofa, rug and a remote control. Then, by accident, everything is returned! To locate the returned objects, you search through your inventory, but after searching, the only object you can locate is the remote control. Where did everything else go? The television, coffee table, sofa and rug have been merged with the remote control. Simply drag the remote control from your inventory onto the ground everything else that was returned with the remote control should appear.

Trivia: Icons are used to represent different types of items in your inventory. The icons used for objects and coalesced objects are similar, but different. The object has an icon that looks like a cube, the coalesced object has an icon that looks like a stack of cubes.

Use the steps below to locate objects that have been recently coalesced and returned to your inventory:

• Click the Inventory button
• In the Inventory window, go to Sort > By Date
• Locate the Lost and Found folder
• From top to bottom, work through the list of objects, dragging each object onto the ground until you locate the missing objects

Inventory Filters

The Filters panel in your Inventory window contains a list of different inventory types. To learn how to use the Filters panel, follow the steps below:

• Click the Inventory button
• Inside the Inventory window, choose File > Reset Filters
• Choose File > Show Filters

Here, we make adjustments so that we only view Objects in the search results:

• Click the None button to turn off all filtering type options
• Go back and turn on the Objects option

To view objects placed into your inventory within the last 7 days:

• Enter “7” into Days Ago
• Press the Enter key

To find your own filtering style, experiment with the options in the Filters panel. If you ever need to reset all options back to their defaults, simply go to File > Reset Filters.