I think there’s more background and detail in this version: https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-delet...
We've changed the URL to that from https://kottke.org/12/05/how-pixar-almost-deleted-toy-story-.... Thanks!
Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#22Related:
A baby saved ‘Toy Story 2’ from near complete deletion (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330740 - Feb 2022 (121 comments)
Toy Story 2 files wiped by accident, restored thanks to work-from-home employee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23022717 - April 2020 (2 comments)
How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20271179 - June 2019 (2 comments)
Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on Purpose (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20265328 - June 2019 (4 comments)
How One Line of Text Nearly Killed Toy Story 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16621848 - March 2018 (1 comment)
How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice [] (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15978145 - Dec 2017 (1 comment)
Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13417037 - Jan 2017 (253 comments)
How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on Purpose - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11500467 - April 2016 (1 comment)
Rm -rf nearly killed Toy Story 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11326831 - March 2016 (1 comment)
How Toy Story 2 was nearly lost - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739675 - June 2015 (1 comment)
Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8786790 - Dec 2014 (2 comments)
How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice once by tech & again for its own good - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4001714 - May 2012 (1 comment)
How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 To A Bad Backup - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972798 - May 2012 (75 comments)
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#23this is insane to me because individual frames for a Pixar film are around 1GB in size. 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…
I think this story is about the models, not the rendered frames.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#24Earlier 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?
Most backup systems allow you to explore backups and extract individual files. Testing a bunch of files for restoring is at least better than completely ignoring it.. however it's difficult if it turns out part of your backup is simply missing, maybe an erroneous exclusion entry or some path miss (happened to me, I was without backup for a home folder for a year before I noticed it, the /home/user/ was a symlink to another volume that mostly had tmp data and so wasn't backed up). You might not even notice this even if you restore the whole backup, because you can't really be expected to go through everything every time either..
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#25More 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.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#26Earlier 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?
md5sum using a bash script and find, then compare on live.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#27Related: A baby saved ‘Toy Story 2’ from near complete deletion (2021) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30330740 - Feb 2022 (121 comments) Toy Story 2 files wiped by accident, restored thanks to work-from-home employee - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23022717 - April 2020 (2 comments) How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20271179 - June 2019 (2 comments)…
It looks like you're saying you've had this conversation before.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#28More 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.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
Worth it. Love that movie.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#29this is insane to me because individual frames for a Pixar film are around 1GB in size. 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…
I think this story is about the models, not the rendered frames.
well that's my point. I always thought that what was lost were frame definition files, and not the models. surely every animator had copies of the models; you can't animate without them, and the movie was in production when the data was lost, so they had those models, or certainly most of them.
I think what was lost was the animations, and not the models or the frame/scene files.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#30More 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.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
It is good to hear that big up front design sucks as much for movies as it does for software.