In 1998, a single command nearly erased years of work on Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 2’.
An employee working on the film accidentally ran a command that started rapidly deleting the movie’s files from the company servers.
Within seconds, about 90% of the animated film was gone. The team watched in horror as character models, environments, and entire scenes vanished.
The real panic set in when they discovered their routine data backups had also been failing for the past month. There was no recent official copy to restore from.
Just when it seemed like the entire multi-million dollar project was lost, a small bit of hope appeared from an unexpected place.
Galyn Susman, the film’s supervising technical director, had recently had a baby and was working from home part-time.
To do her work, she had a copy of the entire film on her personal computer at her house. The team wrapped her computer in blankets, drove it carefully back to the studio, and began the recovery.
Her backup, while not perfect, was enough to restore almost everything that had been lost, saving the movie from being completely restarted.
Sources: Ed Catmull’s ‘Creativity, Inc.’, The Verge, Wikipedia
(Tom: This serves as cautionary tale for all digital creators. I once had the thought that I should create a regimen for people to learn and follow for backing up. Then I read this and found another had already done an excellent job AND made it interesting!)