What do you think of this fact?
Imagine working on a movie for months and then watching it disappear, file by file. That is exactly what happened at Pixar in 1998.
One command, 90 percent gone
According to a detailed account by The Next Web, someone ran a delete command on the server that held the files for Toy Story 2. It was most likely rm -r -f, a Unix command that deletes a folder and everything inside it without asking. People at Pixar watched characters and sets vanish from their screens. Oren Jacob, then an associate technical director on the film, had the server unplugged. By then, about 90 percent of the movie’s files were gone.
The obvious fix would have been the backups. But Pixar’s tape backups had never been properly checked, and they had quietly stopped working as they should.
Rescue by Volvo
The film was saved by Galyn Susman, its supervising technical director. She was working from home at the time and had a computer there with a full copy of the movie, about two weeks old. Jacob and Susman drove to her house, wrapped the computer in blankets, belted it into the back seat of her Volvo and drove it very carefully back to Pixar. TechSpot, which draws among other things on Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull’s book Creativity, Inc., also describes that copy as likely the only intact version of the film.
After that, the team spent a weekend checking files by hand. According to The Next Web, about 70,000 files were verified, with 30,000 still to go.
The twist
Here’s the kicker: after all that, the story was judged not good enough. Production shut down on December 15, 1998, and the team rebuilt most of the film in about nine months. It still hit theaters on time in November 1999.
Bonus fact: Oren Jacob, who had the plug pulled that day, later became Pixar’s chief technology officer.
Somewhere out there is a Volvo that once carried Woody and Buzz in the back seat.