At some point, we have all experienced the pain and the panic of losing hours of work just because a file closed before the “save” button could be hit. Now imagine the plight of those Pixar employees, who spent months working on Toy Story 2, only to watch it get deleted ‘by accident’.
A wrong commnad
This happened in December 1998, when there was less than a year left for the movie’s release. An employee made the mistake of entering a wrong command, leading to nearly 90% of the work being wiped off.
Back then, cloud storage was not the norm. Hence all the assets — like the design of Woody’s hat, or Mr. Potato’s eyes — were stored in an in-house server which was then connected to a network of computers that the animators used to work on.
According to Pixar’s co-founder Ed Catmull’s book ‘Creativity, Inc.’, the team started to notice each of those elements starting to disappear one by one.
Oren Jacob, the associate technical director of the project, realised what was happening and decided to pull the plug on the master server. However, by then the damage had been done. It would take a team of 30 people over one year to recreate the work that had been lost.
And the back-up failed...
To compound the problem, even the back-up had failed. An emergency meeting was called and there were talks of not just delaying the release, but even scrapping the film altogether.
The light bulb moment
Just then, a light bulb went off in the head of Galyn Susman — the supervising technical director. A few months back, she had given birth to her son Eli and had hence, been working from home a lot. She felt that there was a chance a back-up existed on her home computer.
Accompanied by Jacob, Galyn immediately drove to her house to fetch her computer. Legend goes that they wrapped it in pillows and blankets and drove back to the office very slowly.
And voila! The back-up on Susman’s personal computer worked and thus, the $90 million dollar project was saved. Toy Story 2 went on to become a major success, grossing nearly $500 million worldwide.
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