In 1998, the Pixar animation team watched in horror as the digital files for their upcoming feature, Toy Story 2, began to vanish from their computer screens. A single rogue command erased 90 percent of the project, and the official data backups were completely broken.
The movie was eventually salvaged using a computer strapped into the back of a Volvo, but the rescue operation was only the beginning. Months later, the studio’s directors would intentionally throw the restored film in the trash and remake the entire movie from scratch with only nine months left on the clock.
The Command That Erased Woody and Buzz
During production, Oren Jacob and Larry Cutler were looking at a character directory when the files suddenly began to disappear. Someone on the Pixar network had accidentally executed the command “rm -r -f *” at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project.
The system began deleting the file structure from the inside out. Jacob immediately called the machine room and ordered them to pull the power cord on the main server. When the system was brought back online hours later, 90 percent of the movie was gone. The team assumed they could use their tape backups, but they soon discovered the backup drive had reached its 4-gigabyte limit long ago, silently failing to store new files.
A Million-Dollar Computer in a Volvo
With the official backups corrupted, the studio panicked. Then, Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman remembered she had a Silicon Graphics workstation at her house. Susman had recently given birth and received an entire copy of the movie’s file tree to work from home.
Jacob and Susman jumped into her Volvo, drove to her house, wrapped the computer in blankets, and strapped it into the back seat with seatbelts. They drove it back to Pixar, where eight people carried it into the machine room on a piece of plywood. The computer booted successfully, providing the team with a two-week-old copy of the film.
A Grueling Weekend Restoral
The team spent the weekend comparing the home computer’s files against older, fragmented backups. A rotating shift of staff worked non-stop from Friday to Monday morning.
They manually reviewed 30,000 individual files to check their integrity. Local businesses sent free food, and someone hired a masseuse to walk around the office. By Monday, the project rendered successfully, and the movie was functional again.
Trashing the Movie on Purpose
Despite the rescue, Toy Story 2 faced another hurdle. In December 1998, Pixar executives reviewed the film and decided it was not good. They scrapped almost all the animation, layout, and lighting they had just saved.
Starting in January 1999, the crew worked 100-hour weeks to completely remake the movie in just nine months, successfully hitting the unchangeable November 22, 1999, release date.