Feature Request: IAR downloads on-demand

[Frank SquirrelHerder]

One of the biggest selling points for Kitely is the ability for sim owners to download OAR backup files on-demand. As content creators, that's just such a basic, common-sense feature which seems to be missing from many other grids.

What's still glaringly lacking, however, is the ability to back up avatar inventories.

It's my understanding that Kitely automatically backs up avatar inventories, but there is at present no way for us as paying clients to obtain those inventory backups. This is true of all other open sim grids, to my understanding.

This is a significant sore spot for me, as a content creator and active user. I currently have just shy of 10,000 items in my inventory, and I'm sure that number won't ever shrink. My wife's avatar has several thousand items as well, and we'll be creating alts for our machinima projects.

At present, a possible workaround is to box my inventory and rez those boxes in world, save an OAR of my sim, and then pick those boxes back up. Obviously, this is not a desirable workflow.

Realizing it's easy for me to say and infinitely harder for you to do, would you consider adding the ability to download IAR files for our avatars? I guarantee this would be a massive selling point to differentiate Kitely from other grids.

In this modern age, I backup my whole hard drive to Dropbox in real time (which itself maintains 30-days of rollbacks), in addition to duplicating those backups to five local hard disks. I may be overly cautious, but when you lose even an hour's worth of work it's incredibly demoralizing!

Surely the countless hours of inventory acquisition and organizing could be packaged and downloaded by your paying clients to allow us further peace of mind. Please give serious consideration to this request, not just as a matter of convenience to your users, but as a significant product differentiator for the Kitely grid.

[Frank SquirrelHerder]

I just wanted to add, that IAR downloads would be hugely in keeping with your advertised points (attached) of being vendor-agnostic along with the capacity to perform backups.

I'm sure there are technical reasons this hasn't already been implemented, but I wish to urge you to give this feature priority as I do believe it will appeal to developers. If it needs to be a premium add-on feature, I for one would gladly pay for the privilege of downloading IARs.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Frank,

Some people's inventories include hundreds of thousands (!) of items, that take up hundreds of gigabytes of storage space. While that is rare, having tens of thousands of inventory items in ones inventory is quite common. Creating an OAR file of such inventories could easily result in IAR files that are tens of gigabytes in size, and that would cost us a lot of money in server time, storage costs and network fees. In addition, downloading and uploading such large files is going to take a long time for most people, which would result in higher chances of the operation failing and people attempting to restart it again.

You'll note that we also don't support importing content into Kitely using IAR files, as the costs of doing so would also be potentially prohibitive.

In other words, while it would make people happy, it would be too expensive for us to support IAR files, even for paying customers.

Having said all that, as you've stated yourself, you can already package some of your inventory in boxes, rezz those in your Kitely world and export it as an OAR file. Similarly, you can give copies of exportable content to avatars visiting Kitely from other grids, and you can teleport to other grids and rezz copies of exportable content outside Kitely.

[Frank SquirrelHerder]

I hear what you're saying; there are technical hurdles (which is likely why no grid offers such a service).

If these technical hurdles could be overcome, however, I'm certain there are those of us who would be very happy to pay a surcharge for each individual IAR backup.

I regularly deal with multi-gigabye file sharing for audiobooks and massive PSD files with my contractors, so of course super-sized file sharing is a possibility.

While Kitely will hopefully be around for decades to come, there have been plenty of other grids which collapsed when the person at the helm walked away. Please know that for those of us who invest a great deal of time into your grid, we desire IARs not because we wish to burden you or your server resources, nor because we wish to migrate to another grid, but because our IARs (and OARs) represent an investment we don't wish to lose.

Maybe an inventory folder ("vault" or "backup") could be offered (similar to # Kitely Market) where Kitely users could store their most-valued objects and items for IAR downloading? There could be a size limit to those folders, of a gig or three (whatever is technically feasible).

OAR downloads on-demand are an absolute gold standard in Open Sim, and Kitely excels at that. Offering some variation of IAR backup would level that feature up greatly.

[Ilan Tochner]

Hi Frank,

The reasons not to add this feature are both financial and technical. Of course, we could make it expensive enough to justify our costs but then people would complain about its price. You and others might not be among those who will complain about it but many others will. Because of this, investing the R&D resources to implement this feature could easily cause us to lose more business than we gain. In addition, as with any feature, there is the matter of prioritizing what we work on. There is a long list of features and capabilities that we could invest our R&D resources on that would have much clearer positive impact on our business. Adding a feature that only a few people end up using (because of its price) would be a lot less beneficial than adding features that would help the great majority of our users.

Finally, as you've stated, we already provide automatic OAR file creation on demand so people who want to export their inventory from Kitely can already do so using that method (or using their avatar as mentioned in my previous reply).

[Frank SquirrelHerder]

Thank you for taking the time to explain the rationale behind this, Ilan.

I'm stubborn and thick-headed, so don't be surprised if I bring this idea up again in the future!

[Frank SquirrelHerder]

There is no harm in asking Frank, and we're always open to explaining our reasoning.