We all know about the importance of saving the work which we have been tirelessly working on and taking backups in case disaster strikes. Pixar’s Toy Story 2 crew learned this lesson the hard way. In 1998, a year before the release of the movie, 90% of the movie was deleted due to one single computer command.
An animator (whose identity hasn’t been revealed) was working on routine clean-up of files in the system, and he entered the command ‘/bin/rm -r -f*’ on the drive where all the files were being stored. This command is used to remove everything from a particular location, and well, it did complete its job very quickly.
One of the film directors was the first to notice that something was wrong. Woody, the central animated character, had started to disappear from their screens, first the hat, then the boots, then poof! The entire character was gone. He immediately called the system support and asked them to pull the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine, leaving everyone confused. And even though they shut down the machine, 90% of the movie had been erased in a matter of seconds.
It wasn’t all bad, yet. They turned to restore the backup that would give them access to all the data barring the last two days. And that is when they realised that their backup system had also failed, and Pixar did not have any backup of the movie that they had been working on. And it would have taken a year or more to recreate the work.
But Toy Story 2 did release on time, and it was because of a miracle (baby) in disguise! One of the technical directors had recently given birth and she had taken the entire copy of the movie to work from home. Her computer was carried from home to the Pixar studio like an “Egyptian Pharaoh”, the director recalled.
And even though some work had been lost, it saved the company from losing an entire movie, and making its release deadline. It also nudged Pixar to adopt data management processes which ensured that such a situation never arose in the future. A lot of us are tired from the work from home concept already, but it’s the best thing that happened to the Pixar team!
Image credits: Austin McConnell
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