How Toy Story 2 was almost deleted

The story

In 1998, an animator at Pixar was doing some routine cleanup of files on the company’s servers. The command they ran was aimed at the wrong folder: the top folder holding everything for Toy Story 2.

Associate technical director Oren Jacob noticed character models disappearing from the work in progress. By the time the file servers were shut down, about 90 percent of two years of work was gone.

The team turned to the backups. They had not been working for roughly a month.

The film was saved by luck. Technical director Galyn Susman had been working from home after the birth of her child, and she had a copy of the film on her home computer. The team carefully brought that computer in and rebuilt almost everything from it, losing only a few days of recent work.

Why it mattered

The backups had been failing for about a month and nobody knew, because nobody had tried to restore anything from them. A major film survived only because one person happened to have a copy at home. It became one of the best-known reminders that a backup only counts once a restore has been tested.

The lesson today

Pixar had backups. Nobody knew they had stopped. A backup that fails quietly gives no warning until the day it is needed. The fix is routine: check backup results every day, and test restores on a schedule so you know the copies actually work.