How a backup on a pregnant mom's computer saved Toy Story 2
In 1998, an accidental command deleted 90% of Pixar's files for Toy Story 2. Worse, the master backup system had silently failed. The film was rescued by Galyn Susman, the supervising technical director, who had been working from home after giving birth. She had a copy of the entire movie database on her home computer. They carefully drove her computer to Pixar to restore the film.
The Disappearing Digital Assets
In 1998, during the height of production on Toy Story 2, animators and technical staff at Pixar began noticing strange errors on their workstations. Crucial 3D model files, background environments, and entire scene assets were silently vanishing from the shared file systems. Woody's character model, boots, hat, and complex animation rigs suddenly ceased to exist in their directories. What initially appeared to be a localized software glitch quickly revealed itself to be a catastrophic, studio-wide deletion event.
The culprit was an errant command executed on the shared central drive where the film's assets were stored. A routine clean-up command, intended to clear temporary files, had been run at the root level of the master directory. Because the system processed the command recursively with administrator permissions, it methodically stripped away months of irreplaceable modeling, shading, lighting, and animation work across the studio's network before anyone realized what was happening.
The Race to Unplug the Servers
Oren Jacob, the associate technical director on the film, was among the first to witness the destruction in real time. As he looked through character directories, file counts plummeted by the thousands every few seconds. Realizing that a recursive deletion process was actively tearing through the master filesystem, the production team scrambled to stop the command from finishing its run.
Because stopping the command through software meant waiting for the system to process interrupts while files continued to be wiped, staff resorted to drastic physical measures. Personnel rushed directly to the server room and severed the power connections to the central file servers. While pulling the plugs halted the deletion process, roughly ninety percent of the production data had already been stripped from the primary drives.