Did you interact with all of the tents in any way every few days?

TiredMiner adresses an important point here.

All persistent items have a life time. If no player interaction happens during that time, they will get deleted in order to keep the servers from filling up with "dead gear" e.g. lying around somewhere in the woods.

That's why you might have lost your tents to the "void". Make sure to interact with your persistent objects at least once a day if you hadn't done that and please let us know if that was the case.

Regards,
Johnny

Not trying to stir up a conspiracy, nor am I accusing anyone of anything.
Was some servers not claiming to have it turned on when in fact it wasn't to boost population? Just a thought.

Johnny,

We were interacting with the items on a daily basis. Just prior to losing the items, we had interacted with them just hours before. When interacting, we moved items within the tents and backpacks and moved the actual items to different locations in the vicinity.

RagedDrew,

I made it clear in the description that this server had persistence on for the entire duration of patch .49 when persistence was enabled/on. The tents and backpacks remained on the server through server restarts. Even after losing 4 of the tents, there were two that remained. This discredits any idea of persistence being falsely advertised on our particular server.

I'd like to add that this is the case only for "rare" items. Where as normal backpacks, foodstuffs and ammo stay in the tents, it's scopes and high capacity vests that vanish.

Me and a friend are playing on a persistance on server, and have 2 tents set up. I've left a mosin with scope outside the tent, near it on the floor. And have a PU scope in the tent. We played last night, and left the gear. I logged on this morning, the tents and most of the standard items were there, but both the longrange scope and PU scope are gone from tent and rifle.

So, even though persistance "works" for the bigger part, I suggest not logging off from servers with rare items in tents or outside. Just have them on your character instead.