Rollbacks

This article discusses Estate and Private Region autosaves and restores, commonly referred to as rollbacks.

Note: We don't perform rollbacks on mainland regions.

What are rollbacks?

All Regions, including your Estate, will be automatically backed up at regular intervals throughout the day; we hold several days' worth of these backup states. This saves everything about your Estate:

• The terrain
• The land parcels
• The builds
• Textures and settings

The only things not saved are avatars themselves.

This means that under certain circumstances, your Region can be rolled back to a previous state. In the event of a large and significant emergency, you can request a rollback via the Concierge service. Performing a rollback can have serious consequences and should therefore not be thought of as an "Undo" feature on your Estate; rather, it's a safety mechanism to be used only when something goes very badly wrong.

Rollbacks are performed at our discretion.

How do I request a rollback?

Only the Estate owner or Estate manager can request a rollback.

You will need to submit a support ticket in order to request a rollback.

Please explain:

• What has happened
• Why you need the rollback
• Which Region it is
• Precisely how far back in time you would need to go to repair the situation
• It helps if you provide the time in 24 hour format, and always Pacific Time rather than your local time

If you have a Basic account, you can still submit a ticket through the Solution Finder by using the login "guest/guest." Choose the Special Questions - Basic account or Guest Login ticket type.  Then, fill out the information. Any other support ticket submitted by the "guest/guest" login will be ignored.

In addition, you can contact members of the concierge team inworld via IM -- but they will still need you to fill out a support ticket, as we need a record of the request.

We are not responsible for problems caused by Estate managers requesting rollbacks against the Estate owners' wishes. If they are trusted by you as Estate managers, we will trust them for rollback requests.

Generally, rollbacks will not be processed for a time frame longer than 72 hours from the original event. Please be aware that we cannot roll back indefinitely. The longer you leave it before requesting the rollback, the more chance that we will not be able to do this for you, so do make the request as soon as the problem occurs.

How long does a rollback take?

Rollback requests are processed in the order that they are received, with emergency requests taking precedent. Please note that rollbacks that are not time sensitive may take up to 2 business days to process.

What does a rollback do, and why can it be bad?

The backups taken are exact copies of the state of the Region at the exact moment it was saved. That is to say, everything about your Estate and the objects in it, as a snapshot in time, is saved.

When we rollback, we essentially replace the Now with the Then. We set the Estate back to the exact state it was in when the backup was made and all changes -- everything that has happened between the moment the save happened and now -- will be lost, undone or reset.

It is very important to understand what this means before you request a rollback. Some examples of unexpected consequences of a rollback include:

• People who were banned becoming unbanned, for all parcels and the Estate itself.
• People granted access suddenly finding they are banned.
• If there have been any land parcel changes, these will be undone.
• If someone sold/gave up land to tier down, that land will suddenly belong to them again -- potentially pushing them over their new tier once more.
• If someone had tiered up and taken a parcel of land, they will suddenly find their land no longer theirs and their content gone. Their tier will remain the same, but they will have lost the land -- leaving them out of pocket. If you have edited the parcel layouts, these will snap back and be undone, causing you to have to repeat that work.
• Objects that were placed (rezzed) inworld after the backup was taken will be lost. This is particularly bad if they're No Copy objects, as you will lose your only copy (they literally didn't exist when the backup was done).
• Conversely, No Copy objects that were rezzed at the time of the backup but then subsequently taken back into your inventory will reappear where they were at that point in time.
  Deliberate use of rollbacks to obtain additional copies of No Copy content can be considered abuse, and are dealt with accordingly.
• Any changes to builds themselves will be undone: Textures are reverted and prims reset to the state they were in at the point the backup was taken. This may mean that recent tenants lose their prefab, or their furniture. It may mean that new sale items will disappear.
• Any terraforming that has been done will be undone and any recent changes to land textures will be lost.
• Script changes to objects performed after the backup point will be lost. Scripted vendors that were updated with new content since the backup was taken will have those changes removed.

As you can see, rollbacks have significant issues associated with them and should only be requested when absolutely necessary.