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DLP software hadn't yet been invented
It's 2022. Test your backups.
https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-delet...
This is a great example of why it's a good idea to always test your backups.
recall how large laptop hard drives were before Toy Story 2 (2002)...
I have an extremely small amount of experience writing shaders for RenderMan (BMRT, actually), and those aren't large. animation data typically isn't HUGE, but models sure as heck are, and a frame you send to RenderMan is concrete (it used to be, maybe it isn't anymore?) meaning that all geometry was present in the file you gave to RenderMan, only the compiled shaders were referenced from it, because they were procedural and could not be statically included. so I guess the frames the renderer sees are sort of like the binaries of what I would now view as a software compilation process.
More details on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-d... The ending is sad -- that intrepid recovery mostly didn't end up used: And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on Blu-Ray.
And I suspect that the recovery of character models and other assets was still instrumental in making the final film, if not the actual shots/sequences themselves.
More details on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-d... The ending is sad -- that intrepid recovery mostly didn't end up used: And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on Blu-Ray.
There are a few more details about that side of the story elsewhere:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/...
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/toy-story-2-disasters-almos...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came to make this snide comment as well! Nobody tests their backups though, I've only ever seen it done inadvertently when the backups were used as part of the development process.
BTW how do you test a personal workstation backup? I don’t have backup workstations to rotate between by backing one up, restoring on the other, working and then cycling between them in this manner. How do you test the restore procedure without risking destruction of the original?
I reached out to the Systems team to suggest they look into mounting the home directories with the no-setuid option, and one of them invited me over to pair at their desk. They explained that there was a trick, where you could leave the existing mount point as is, with its existing mount options, and then mount the same device somewhere else with different options. So they got a root shell, went into some scratch directory, mounted the homedirs there, and we tested things out.
I forget how that went, or what happened next, but it seems that we neglected to clean up after this experiment, and at some point, another Systems engineer was looking around the scratch directory and perhaps ran something like `du -ak` (forgetting to specify the option that disables crossing onto new devices), finding what appeared to be a gigantic copy of everyone's home directories.
So they started `rm -rf`'ing it, and made a pretty huge dent before the phones started ringing and they realized that what they were erasing was not a copy on a local scratch space, but rather the real thing over on the NFS drive.
Fortunately, this company did have great backups.