It is one of the best disaster stories in modern filmmaking, and the remarkable thing is how much of it holds up. In 1998, deep in production on Toy Story 2, someone at Pixar ran a delete command on the film’s master files and watched roughly 90 per cent of the project vanish from the company’s servers. The production survived in large part because a technical director on the team, Galyn Susman, had been working from home after having a baby and had a copy of the film on a computer at her house.
All of that is true. The part the retelling usually leaves out is what happened next, and it is arguably the better story.
What the command did
The account comes from people who were in the room. Oren Jacob, then an assistant technical director on the film and later Pixar’s chief technology officer, described the moment in a 2012 interview with The Next Web. He and a colleague were looking at the directory holding the files for Woody when they noticed, on a refresh, that there were fewer files than a moment before. Then folders for other characters began disappearing too.
The command responsible was most likely “rm -rf *”, a standard Unix instruction that tells the system to delete every file below the current location, without prompting and without a recycle bin to fall back on. It had been run at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project. Jacob’s description of watching it work was that the system was deleting its way out through the file structure like a worm eating out from the core of an apple. By the time someone pulled the power, most of the film’s assets were gone.
The backups had quietly failed
A deletion like that should have been an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe, because a studio of Pixar’s size kept backups. The problem was that the backups had not been working.
By the accounts of Jacob and Susman, who both tell the story in Pixar’s own behind-the-scenes feature “The Movie Vanishes”, the studio’s backup system had been failing silently for about a month, so the copies that should have restored the film were unusable. That is the detail that turned a bad afternoon into an existential one. The safety net everyone assumed was there had a hole in it that nobody had noticed.
The computer carried in like a pharaoh
Susman, the supervising technical director on the film, had recently had a baby and was working from home, and Pixar had set her up with a machine so she could keep contributing. That machine held a relatively recent copy of the film, around two weeks old.
The retrieval became its own careful operation. Jacob has described Susman’s computer being transported back to Pixar wrapped and cradled, carried in, in his phrase, like an Egyptian pharaoh, because a knock to the hard drive could have destroyed the only surviving copy. The recovery worked. The team lost only a few days of the most recent work rather than the entire production. On the narrow question the factoid asks, whether a home copy saved the film from the deletion, the answer is yes.
Then they threw most of it away on purpose
Here is the twist the short version skips. Having rescued the film from deletion, Pixar then decided the film was not good enough and largely remade it anyway.
At the time, the studio’s leadership looked at the version they had saved and concluded it did not work as a story. In the months that followed they rebuilt much of the picture. By Jacob’s account effectively all of the animation was tossed, all of the layout and camera work was started again, and new characters were built. The film was substantially redone in roughly nine months to hit its release date.
So the movie that reached cinemas in late 1999, and that became one of the rare sequels widely held to match or beat the original, was not really the file that Susman’s computer preserved. Her copy saved the production from the accident. The creative overhaul that followed is what saved the film as a film. The factoid keeps the first rescue and drops the second, which is a shame, because the two together make the point that the technical near-death was not even the hardest part.
What to keep from the story
The core is accurate. A delete command really did wipe out most of Toy Story 2, the backups really had failed, and a copy on a team member’s home computer really did pull the production back from the edge. Galyn Susman, who went on to a long career at Pixar, is rightly remembered for it.
The fuller version is just better. The film was nearly lost twice, once to a stray command and once to a deliberate decision that it was not good enough, and it survived both. The home backup is the part that makes a clean anecdote. The remake is the part that made the movie.
