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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clearly they're talking about the CG source, not the rendered result.
Even even if it's un-rendered, we're still talking TBs of meshes, scenes, textures, mattes, etc. That part didn't make sense to me. Maybe it was in the storyboard phase.
I couldn't watch the video because I'm on a train - however, I worked at Pixar from 2002 - 2008, so I'm pretty sure I know exactly what this video is about.
This story was legendary inside the studio - I never thought it would get outside the gates. In some ways, the fact that this had happened in the past, when the assets for a film might actually fit on a single workstation, was great.
Everyone was more careful. The Systems group was great at backups, recovery, and did an amazing job the whole time I was there, and I'm sure this story always sat in the back of their minds as a reminder of why they spent all the extra time and money.
The one time I accidentally locally deleted a day's work, I had a recovery in my home directory in less than an hour.
The best backups are the ones you take home at the end of the day. Our IT team is quite small and we don't have Pixar money, but we are able to afford a few USB drives. The important stuff to keep a company running (tax records, receipts, etc.) are copied to a folder. It's not exactly terabytes of wireframes and renderman files, a few thousand office documents takes up 1GB at the most. We tried backup software but ea…
I am vehemently against take-home-backups. You may trust your team members but they can still be robbed, get their cars/homes broken into, or just simply lose the drives. While chances of smart-criminal exploiting your data to gain competitive advantage is very low, the chances of your private information being sold to others is very high - someone can get your customer CC#s, employee SSNs etc. very easily. How often do we hear about an employee lose a laptop or HDD that contains 2 million CC#s and SSNs in an Excel or Access file? Please don't set yourself up for that.
With respect to backup software, my favorite way of backup on Windows is robocopy. I've been using it for 4+ years and it has worked flawlessly EVERY SINGLE time for me. I have very simple DOS scripts that mirror the entire source folder to destination\YYYY-MM folder. Since I only have about 300GB of data and 8TB of storage, I also mirror the source to destination\weekday folder. What this gives me is the ability to retrieve files from any day in last 7 days, or any past month (depending on disk space available). And destination\YYYY-MM always has last night's data.
DOS>robocopy "\\SrcServer\SrcFolder" "\\DestServer\%weekday%" /E /R:1 /W:3 /PURGE /COPYALL /FFT
DOS>robocopy "\\SrcServer\SrcFolder" "\\DestServer\%yyyy%-%mm%" /E /R:1 /W:3 /PURGE /COPYALL /FFT
so... they actually allow personel to make a copy for personal use from a not-jet released movie? And then they wonder how these things come up on various download sites?
It's not Ebola, and these are all people who worked on Toy Story. John Carmack isn't going to leak Doom 4. I'm pretty sure he can be trusted with that one. Why would you give away your life's work to some thieving bastard on the internet who you'd never met and didn't care about you, anyway?
On a large operation you can't rule out the bitter ex-employee factor either.
If you want to be sure your database backups work, use your backups for development.
It seems like you could just swap them daily, I guess.
I hate posting about Pixar stories because the Steve Jobs omerta still lives strong in me... but what the hell. I couldn't watch the video because I'm on a train - however, I worked at Pixar from 2002 - 2008, so I'm pretty sure I know exactly what this video is about. This story was legendary inside the studio - I never thought it would get outside the gates. In some ways, the fact that this had happened in the past,…
The best backups are the ones you take home at the end of the day. Our IT team is quite small and we don't have Pixar money, but we are able to afford a few USB drives. The important stuff to keep a company running (tax records, receipts, etc.) are copied to a folder. It's not exactly terabytes of wireframes and renderman files, a few thousand office documents takes up 1GB at the most. We tried backup software but ea…
The gov site visitor was running one of the other programs and "wrote us up" for taking up too much time / effort with backups. we protested and got ourselves cleared to continue. Eight months later I was told that one of the sites lost all their data in a flood. Guess keeping all your data onsite in the basement doesn't really work.
The best backups are the ones you take home at the end of the day. Our IT team is quite small and we don't have Pixar money, but we are able to afford a few USB drives. The important stuff to keep a company running (tax records, receipts, etc.) are copied to a folder. It's not exactly terabytes of wireframes and renderman files, a few thousand office documents takes up 1GB at the most. We tried backup software but ea…
I hope you make encryption mandatory on those USB drives. Losing one could cost you (your) business! Simple GPG encryption or even truecrypt containers work wonders.
The best backups are the ones you take home at the end of the day. Our IT team is quite small and we don't have Pixar money, but we are able to afford a few USB drives. The important stuff to keep a company running (tax records, receipts, etc.) are copied to a folder. It's not exactly terabytes of wireframes and renderman files, a few thousand office documents takes up 1GB at the most. We tried backup software but ea…
If all you have is 1GB-100GB, put it on Dropbox connected to 2-3 computers and forget about it. If you have 1TB or more data, look into Open-E SANs. They are very competitively priced. I am vehemently against take-home-backups. You may trust your team members but they can still be robbed, get their cars/homes broken into, or just simply lose the drives. While chances of smart-criminal exploiting your data to gain com…
Our clients are big companies, we don't have nor use credit card machines. Strictly purchase orders and 5-figure checks each month. We are in another country and SSNs aren't used the same way like they are in the US (tied, to your bank, credit, retirement, etc). The most someone could do with an employee ID is buy products with our tax id, we'll happily take a VAT refund for you, or someone could use your SSN to apply for a job (can be problematic around tax time but not end of world).
We do have 2 NASes (one backs up the other) that do dailies. The USB drives are for office on fire/big theft tragedies. I'm trying to get us on cloud storage, but pushing data over a DSL connection was frustrating for just 20 gigs. And the connection died over a weekend. Far easier just to do the USB route. You still can't beat bandwidth of a local HNer living 10 minutes away with a bag of drives.