Ability to Archive Realms

[Bidmaron]

The moment you get more concerned with local hard drive space than ones on cloud is the moment you win the lottery. What am I missing? Why pay for cloud space for deleted realm? Store it on hard drive and take it out of realm list is what you want

[kbs666]

I'll be paying for persistent storage with the cloud service. I assume that anything on my hard drive can and will be lost the next time it crashes.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by Bidmaron

The moment you get more concerned with local hard drive space than ones on cloud is the moment you win the lottery. What am I missing? Why pay for cloud space for deleted realm? Store it on hard drive and take it out of realm list is what you want

This can be done.
Export the entire realm to a file.
Delete the realm from RealmWorks.

When you later want to recover the realm:
Create a blank realm in RealmWorks
Import the file that you previously saved into that new realm.

(The only caveat to this method is that at some future point in the time the format of the realm backup might change to such a degree that a really old realm backup file might no longer successfully import into RealmWorks. At least, not without performing some manual modification on the XML data inside the backup file.)

[kbs666]

Originally Posted by Farling

This can be done.
Export the entire realm to a file.
Delete the realm from RealmWorks.

When you later want to recover the realm:
Create a blank realm in RealmWorks
Import the file that you previously saved into that new realm.

(The only caveat to this method is that at some future point in the time the format of the realm backup might change to such a degree that a really old realm backup file might no longer successfully import into RealmWorks. At least, not without performing some manual modification on the XML data inside the backup file.)

Do not do this!

People have done this and found out to their detriment that deleting from the cloud is very permanent. You do not want to find that a change in XML format leaves you with nothing or a corruption in the file loses your data.

[ShadowChemosh]

Originally Posted by kbs666

People have done this and found out to their detriment that deleting from the cloud is very permanent.

HERE is where EightBitz did this very thing and found its permanent delete.

To be clear deleting the "local" data from your PC is fine. I have done this multiple times. But if you delete a realm from the cloud its "deleted" everywhere even from backups.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by ShadowChemosh

HERE is where EightBitz did this very thing and found its permanent delete.

No, he made a change to the XML file, and found it would not load again.

He did a restore of the entire RealmWorks database, not an import of an unchanged XML export file into a new realm.

The two things are very different. Performing a "Backup Database" and a "Restore Database" is very different to exporting a realm to an RWEXPORT file and then loading that RWEXPORT file into a new realm.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by kbs666

You do not want to find that a change in XML format leaves you with nothing or a corruption in the file loses your data.

Of course, any change in the XML format would also mean that publicly available IMPORT files (such as the shared dungeon) would also not be importable.

[Silveras]

Originally Posted by Farling

No, he made a change to the XML file, and found it would not load again.

He did a restore of the entire RealmWorks database, not an import of an unchanged XML export file into a new realm.

The two things are very different. Performing a "Backup Database" and a "Restore Database" is very different to exporting a realm to an RWEXPORT file and then loading that RWEXPORT file into a new realm.

Agreed in part.
The issue, I think, is that the response there implies that a deleted realm is retained to some degree on the server, and marked deleted. If that is the case, it MAY cause imports that contain the related UUIDs to fail.

Personally, I would make a new Realm and test that before proceeding, just to be safe.

[mazzy]

Original found here by davidp

When you delete a realm, it is permanent as the server is involved in the deletion and has it as deleted. Doing the restore still leaves the realm deleted from the server's perspective so it gets marked as deleted within the restored database.

This is why we have the big huge warning about deleting a realm is permanent.

and

It gets extremely gnarly if deleted realms came back with a restore when dealing also with offline usage and the server. There are cases where it can cause very bad things to happen if we allowed it.

This, to me, sounds like deleting a realm from the server is not an option if you'd like to one day restore it and have access to it via the cloud. I'd be happy with some form of organizing my realms list (like Parody's suggestion), I could easily just create an archive "folder" to throw all the non-critical realms in there so my main list remains uncluttered. Nonetheless, this is one of those "nice to have" type of suggestions, but it will help keep my eye from twitching whenever I see a long list of realms all willy-nilly

[Bidmaron]

This is the reason why I think we are going to see ballooning of cloud storage, in addition to the non purging of deleted record space one of our other users noted.