OSgrid has entered emergency long-term maintenance after discovering that “all IAR files have been corrupted,” the grid announced yesterday.
This is really bad news for residents who hadn’t yet had time to get their inventory backups downloaded ahead of the grid’s previously announced March 21 database reset. OSgrid will now go into immediate and indefinite closure.
“Unfortunately, the current situation has become unsustainable,” the OSgrid team stated in their announcement. “After careful analysis, it has become clear that it is no longer viable to keep OSgrid online under these conditions.”
The corruption of IAR — inventory archive — files is significant as many residents were using these files to back up their inventories ahead of the planned asset wipe. Users who hadn’t already secured their content through alternative methods may now face permanent losses.
Complete rebuild planned
In light of the new problems, the grid’s administrators have decided to completely rebuild the asset system from scratch.
Assets can include objects, clothing, textures, and other items that grid residents store in their avatar inventories. Some assets might have been purchased from OpenSim content creators and can represent a financial investment. Other assets might have been created from scratch by users, representing time, effort, and creativity. As a result, some residents might be hit hard by the loss.
“We have decided to completely rebuild the assets in a new format, in order to resolve ongoing issues and provide a much more robust and sustainable infrastructure,” the announcement stated.
Unlike the previous timeline that promised a March 28 return, the team now describes the reconstruction as “lengthy and meticulous” with no specific reopening date provided.
“We intend to take the necessary time to ensure the result is stable, functional, and, most importantly, secure,” the OSgrid team stated.
Impact on OpenSim users
This sudden closure accelerates the timeline for OSgrid users who had been planning to back up their content. Users who had been creating OARs — OpenSim archive files — of their regions or transferring items to avatars on other grids will no longer be able to access their content.
The situation particularly affects users who:
- Had scheduled backups in the coming days or weeks
- Were relying on the grid’s IAR export tool
- Had placed items in the dedicated storage regions set up for the transition
For the broader OpenSim ecosystem, this emergency closure may increase migration pressure on other grids that had been preparing for a gradual influx of displaced users.
Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner also warns that other grids may suffer from similar data issues as they become popular and may need to revisit their backup policies.
“You have to maintain daily backups of the entire system to enable you to restore it to the last stable state,” he told Hypergrid Business. “If you don’t do this and only rely on data duplication then when a corruption occurs you won’t have uncorrupted copies of the files to restore to.”
Kitely runs daily backups for all its systems, he said, and enables Kitely region owners to request their regions be restored from those backups for any reason. This helps people recover from building accidents without needing to manually back up their regions to OAR files.
“If you’re an OSGrid user who has just lost their home, I recommend you consider the data backup policies of the grid you decide to move to,” Tochner said. “The more people use a grid the more likely it will need to make use of those backup systems.”
Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.
There are currently 20,954 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,054 product variations, 35,814 of which are exportable to other grids. Kitely Market users can have their purchases automatically delivered to avatars on other grids. Kitely Market has delivered orders to 642 OpenSim grids to date, Tochner said.
Kitely Market also provides merchants with a tool that can help their customers regain items that were bought for avatars that belong to grids that have shut down or suffered inventory loss, he said.
Volunteer support
OSgrid is operated entirely by volunteers and the management asked for community understanding during this difficult period. “It is important to remember that OSgrid is run by volunteers, all of whom are deeply passionate and committed to the platform. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that our team consists of real people, parents, and professionals with lives outside of their roles within OSgrid.”
The team promised to provide regular updates on their progress but gave no indication of how frequently these updates would come or through which channels.
OSgrid’s history of challenges
This isn’t the first major disruption for OSgrid. In 2014 and 2015, the grid experienced an extended outage lasting several months, during which significant amounts of user data were lost.
The current situation appears potentially more serious, as the grid is undergoing a complete rebuild of its asset system rather than attempting to repair existing infrastructure.
OSgrid, founded in 2007, has served as both a social hub and a technical testing ground for OpenSim development. As one of the largest hypergrid-enabled virtual worlds, its extended absence will be felt throughout the OpenSim ecosystem.
For users affected by this closure, other OpenSim grids including Wolf Territories, Kitely, and Alternate Metaverse have previously offered assistance in accommodating displaced residents.
