if you are on your on grid, whether hosted on your own box or by a hosting provider or even on your own machine or on a sim-on-a-stick, you need to back it up

your IT department (if self-hosted through your work or school) or a third party provider will typically have some backup strategy in place but . . . if your work and world are important to you, you should actively back it up (i.e., take responsibility for it)

backing up is pretty easy and ask your server techs how they are currently backing up your grid. with SimHost they run a SQL backup daily that dumps onto the server and i just take a copy of it (a SQL backup is very compact and easy to copy)

OARs (region files) are much bigger but are discrete regions meaning that you can replace one affected sim, rather than your entire grid, if need be

for complex and time consuming builds, i still take incremental back-ups as viewer exports as i work on it. no differently than saving often in any other computer work

if you are hosted with an OpenSim provider, ask what tools they may already have that might fit your needs

Reaction Grid has an online tool that just takes one click to back-up a sim. you just dial into your server and grab a copy

with SimHost, James had an in-world tool that proved ideal for me and can also automatically run daily. it can be run “on-demand” too. so if i spent all afternoon making something, i just fly up to my “OAR Generation Station” and click the object – a whisper comes out to let me know it started (it only takes seconds for an OAR file to be made). i RDP to the server and zip up each daily batch then copy to my machine (currently it takes about 20 minutes to pull the copy over)

if you don’t have such resources or are backing up your own install, then running a command on the region’s console does the same thing – save oar filename.oar

how easy is that?

storing and archiving your backups is also easy with a naming convention that is meaningful to you. i just use the date as part of the name of the zipped file (i.e., eh-12-01-2010.oar – “eh” for Enclave Harbour, not Ener Hax!) =p

in Second Life you never had to think about backing up your sim, but then you also paid $295 a month! OpenSim changes many things and gives you more freedom including being responsible for yourself =)