@HOLLYWOOD
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2016–2026
2:26 · 551K views · May 20, 2012
Pixar staff tell the story of how Toy Story 2 was almost deleted from the studio's computers and was saved by a home computer backup.
HN shares it as a classic backup and operations cautionary tale.
3 comments from Hacker News
Took my kids to see Toy Story 5. While watching it, I thought about AI generated content. I have never personally met anyone who worked on any of the Toy Story movies. I know, from documentaries etc, who Brad Bird and John Lasseter are. I've also watched the video [0] about how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted (which I highly recommend if you are in storage, DevOps or SRE). There are other movies like the Wild Robot that: - had big emotional impact on me (b/c I'm a parent) - are 100% animated - I have zero idea who made them I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable. It's all basically on a spectrum of "humans using tools". They care about how the movie makes them feel. It started with humans spitting charcoal at a wall [1] and now it's linear algebra. 0 - this video (Toy Story 2 almost lost) 1 - [LINK] (humans painting on walls0
I was surprised not to see this mentioned in the front page discussion about the guy who supposedly rm rf'ed his web hosting service [1] The (amusing and animated) YouTube video link has since been changed: this video I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation. But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the result of someone with total control and agency who typed in that one line of code and ran it. And they did it to something that is immediately tangible (and beloved) to the average non-programmer. If a professional at Pixar could do something so tragically destructive to something like Toy Story...imagine what you [the novice] could accidentally do. (thus, please remember to use Tab as much as possible to autocomplete) [1] [LINK]
"Pixar Studio Stories: The Movie Vanishes", narrated by Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman: this video "Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?", Quora answer by Oren Jacob: [LINK]