One afternoon in 1998, an animator at Pixar watched Woody's hat disappear from the screen. Then his boots. Then Woody himself, and whole folders of the film around him. Somewhere on the studio's Unix servers, a deletion command — the infamous rm -rf, which removes files recursively and without asking — had been run at the root of the Toy Story 2 project, and it was eating the movie in real time. Staff literally ran to pull the plug on the machine, but by the time the drives spun down, the commonly cited toll was about ninety per cent of two years of work: models, animation, the digital everything of a film due in cinemas the following year. Rebuilding it all from nothing, staff reckoned, would have taken something like a year of work that the release schedule simply did not contain.
This is the point in the story where a studio calmly restores from backup. Pixar tried. The backup system, it turned out, had been quietly failing — by most retellings the tapes had been filling up and writing errors without anyone noticing — and the most recent usable copy was weeks or months stale. The film was, for all practical purposes, gone. The salvation was human and slightly absurd: Galyn Susman, the film's supervising technical director, had recently had a baby, and to work from home she had been keeping a copy of the film synced on a computer at her house. That domestic machine was suddenly the master copy of a nine-figure asset. By the famous account she and a colleague drove it to the studio swaddled in blankets and belted into the back seat like an infant, and after a nervous weekend of file-checking and reassembly, the studio pieced the movie back together from her drives plus surviving fragments. Pixar's Oren Jacob, then an associate technical director, later told the tale with relish; the studio itself immortalised it as a DVD extra.
Deleted twice
The delicious footnote is that much of the rescued film was thrown away anyway — this time on purpose. Toy Story 2 had been conceived as a cheap direct-to-video sequel, a category Disney was then churning out for its animated hits. As the story reels came together, Disney upgraded it to a theatrical release, but by late 1998 Pixar's leadership — John Lasseter, returning from the Bug's Life press tour, with story minds including Andrew Stanton — judged the film simply not good enough. With roughly nine months to the immovable November 1999 release date, they effectively re-boarded and remade the picture: Jessie's backstory ballad "When She Loved Me", sung by Sarah McLachlan, the airport finale and much of the emotional architecture date from that frantic rebuild. The crunch was brutal enough to become a cautionary tale inside Pixar — repetitive strain injuries were rife — but the result made the gamble look inevitable: Toy Story 2 opened in November 1999, earned close to half a billion dollars worldwide, and did the rarest thing a sequel can do, matching or beating its original in most critics' esteem. Randy Newman's song was Oscar-nominated; the film took the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy.
The moral of the missing backup
The deletion has since become the tech industry's favourite bedtime story, told at conferences wherever engineers gather to confess. It has everything: the innocent-looking command with catastrophic defaults, the backup system nobody had tested until the day it mattered, and recovery by a copy that existed for entirely human reasons. "Test your restores, not your backups" is the standard moral, and Pixar duly rebuilt its infrastructure and its habits. The story is also, quiz fans note, widely garbled in retellings — the film was not saved "by accident", but because a technical director had deliberately arranged to keep working while caring for a newborn; and no culprit was ever named publicly for typing the fatal command, a discretion Pixar has maintained for decades.
There is one more irony to file. A film about toys facing obsolescence, storage and the terror of being discarded was itself nearly discarded by a storage failure — and was saved by being loved enough to take home. Woody would understand completely.
Quiz nuggets
- In 1998 a stray rm -rf command deleted the commonly cited figure of about 90 per cent of Toy Story 2 from Pixar's servers — and the backups proved faulty.
- The film survived because supervising technical director Galyn Susman had a working copy at home, having arranged to work there after the birth of her child.
- Toy Story 2 was originally planned as a direct-to-video sequel before Disney upgraded it to a theatrical release.
- Pixar largely remade the film in roughly nine months before its November 1999 release, adding Jessie's song "When She Loved Me", sung by Sarah McLachlan.
- The sequel grossed close to half a billion dollars worldwide and won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy film.