{"id":60766,"date":"2025-07-30T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=60766"},"modified":"2025-07-30T09:00:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T23:00:11","slug":"backing-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=60766","title":{"rendered":"Backing Up"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Toy<\/p>\n

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In 1998, a single command nearly erased years of work on Pixar’s ‘Toy Story 2’.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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An employee working on the film accidentally ran a command that started rapidly deleting the movie’s files from the company servers.<\/div>\n
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Within seconds, about 90% of the animated film was gone. The team watched in horror as character models, environments, and entire scenes vanished.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Just when it seemed like the entire multi-million dollar project was lost, a small bit of hope appeared from an unexpected place.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n
Galyn Susman, the film’s supervising technical director, had recently had a baby and was working from home part-time.<\/div>\n
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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.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Her backup, while not perfect, was enough to restore almost everything that had been lost, saving the movie from being completely restarted.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Sources: Ed Catmull’s ‘Creativity, Inc.’, The Verge, Wikipedia<\/div>\n
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(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!)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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http:\/\/taobackup.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … <\/p>\n

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