“The show’s been trashed”
In 1998, after two months and hundreds of man-hours worth of work Toy Story 2 was being deleted from Pixar’s company servers because an employee keyed in a bad command by mistake. Woody, Potato Head and Rex were lost forever and the only character left in the movie was Hamm.
The Backup Plan
In the IT world when data gets corrupted or lost the first reflex is to restore from backups. Which Pixar obviously did. Unfortunately though at the time Pixar was not testing their backups and so while new data was being stored to their tapes, old data was being pushed out. This meant that though parts of the Toy Story 2 movie were able to be recovered, other parts of the movie were missing. Which parts of the movie thug where unknown. Since the restore was unreliable, there was zero confidence in the data because “the restoral is bad, the work on it is bad, the deletion was horrible, and the backup tapes are busted.”
With an extreme amount of luck, Pixar was able to locate an offsite backup that was sitting in an employees house. It had enough of the data from which to rebuild the movie with and Toy Story 2 was able to be shipped on time. Watch the video below for the play by play on how Toy Story 2 was saved.
Moral of the Story:
- Back up your data
- Test your backups
- Who is responsible for your backups?
- Are they as paranoid about securing your business as you are?
Repost from The Next Web