Load And Save Oar Files at the Fire And Ice Grid using 
Secure Shared Drive Space with Google Drive
Saving And Loading OAR’s at Fire And Ice Grid is now possible through our customer’s website accounts. Firstly, our customers can make personal backups of their regions and restore them at a later time. Secondly, backup files save to the customers shared folder on the Fire And Ice Grids Google drive. Finally, every customer with a website account at Fire And Ice now has a personal shared folder.
Saving And Loading OAR’s – Method and Reasons
We chose to offer this service through google as we believe it is the best-known file and storage system available. In addition, each customers folder is accessible by the customer and us only. Consequently, with our system, the files remain private rather than being accessible by all customers of the service.
Fire And Ice customers can upload and download to their shared Google Drive folder directly. However, it is possible to move files between the shared folder and their own Google Drive in a matter of seconds. Several publicly available OAR files can be saved directly to a personal Google Drive account. Moving a file from there to a shared folder on the Fire And Ice Drive takes seconds. For most customers, this completely negates the need to save to their computer.
Customers Shared Folder
Anyone that is not familiar with uploading to and downloading from google drive can find a helpful guide in The Customer Shared Folder – Fire And Ice Grid.
Additional Benefits of the Approach
Additional benefits to the performance of the website exist. Oar files can be huge; uploading and downloading them could, if un-managed, take up large amounts of the web services resources. Since the actual upload and download of the OAR file is handled by Google, only the load and save process impacts our servers.
Saving And Loading OAR’s
User Account Page – Fire And Ice Grid
Start by visiting the Fire And Ice Opensim Grid Website. Firstly log in if you are not logged in automatically. Secondly use the “Account” link to the left of your user name at the top of the browser.
On your account page, there will be a list of all your regions and avatars.
Clicking on the region name will take you to the Region Manager page.
Saving Region Files To The Shared Folder
Oar Save Request Successful 
Oar Save Limit every 30 days
To create an OAR file for the region, click on the “Save” button. Assuming the request is successful a green notification is then visible at the top of the browser indicating it. Alternatively, if an oar has already been requested in the last thirty days, an error message is shown. Oar files make take a long time to generate. Once it is finished the file becomes visible both on the Region Manager page and directly in the Google Drive Shared Folder.
Loading Region Files From The Shared Folder
All available OAR files inside your shared folder will be displayed in the Region Manager. In most cases, the only requirement is selecting the OAR file you wish to load, then clicking the “Apply To Region” button. Before loading an OAR file to a region please read the warning further down the page.
What Are All These Options? Do I need them?
All the choices not mentioned above are features of OAR files available with Opensimulator. Full details are available on the archives page of the Opensimulator Wiki.
Accessing The Shared Folder – Saving And Loading OAR’s
If you are unfamiliar with using Google drive, please see The Customer Shared Folder – Fire And Ice Grid for details.
Every new customer to the Fire And Ice grid gets a few emails from us as they join. First is the one to confirm their email account. The second is an email with information about the grids social media accounts and similar. Finally, an invite to their shared folder on Google Drive. This one comes from google its self rather than directly from Fire And Ice.
Warning about loading OAR Files – Saving And Loading OAR’s
Loading an OAR file is DESTRUCTIVE. With the default settings, every item currently in the region will be removed and the terrain overwritten. Some of the other settings change this but take equal care. The “Merge” option for example could duplicate every item on the region in exactly the same place. In order to allow users to add their own OAR files to the shared folder, it is not possible to ensure the OAR file you load is for the same size region. Please be sure you wish to entirely replace your region before starting. Please also ensure that unless you know exactly what you’re doing with the extra options, that you only load an OAR from a region of the same size.
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