Production of the movie "Toy Story 2" that overcame the risk of erasing data erroneously

ByBen.hannis

The animation movie "Toy Story 2" handled by Pixar encountered an accident that it loses animation data created over a year during production. Olen Jacob, former Pixar's chief technology officer, told infamously, although it is not widely known why the data that many staff kept making everyday disappeared, and how it was able to reach completion to completion It is.

Oren Jacob's answer to Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? - Quora
https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob

How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on purpose
http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/

In May 2012TestedAn animation · short movie with contents saying "data of Toy Story 2 has disappeared" has been released on the information site. Mr. Jacob who is the creator of this movie leaves Pixar and started a startup called ToyTalk.

Toy Story 2 Almost Vanished - YouTube


Question was raised to question whether the content of this movie is true or not on the real name system Q & A site "Quora", but Mr. Jacob himself answered this question. According to Mr. Jacob, the "loss of data" drawn in a movie is an event that really happened. It seems that the cause of data loss is that someone at the staff is executing the "rm - r - f *" command on Linux in the development environment that Pixar introduced at that time.

The "rm - r - f *" command is a command to erase all files under the referenced directory. In Toy Story 2, it seems that someone of the staff has executed "rm *" command at the root level of the project.

ByDavid

When the data was deleted, Mr. Jacob was talking about Woody 's design with his colleagues. My colleague saw Woody's directory, and 40 files suddenly decreased to 4, and other files also disappeared one after another in the same way as Mr. Jacob.

Mr. Jacob who got panicked immediately called the machine room with the main server and instructed "Pull out the power immediately!", But since hundreds of clients are connected to the server, turn off the power I gave up. And the master machine goes down, the animator PC freezes. That is why we had to stop all the work here. The main machine recovered after a few hours, but about 90% of all Toy Story 2 data had disappeared.

Mr. Jacob gathered the top of Pixar soon and held a meeting and discussions on future countermeasures were done. It was decided here to concentrate only on finding the way to finish the work without searching the perpetrators. About 48 hours after the data was lost, the data was successfully restored from the backup. However, the latest backup was two months old and I noticed that the backup software and verification software I was using did not properly handle the error.

However, luckily here it turns out that one staff was saving the data at home PC. I investigated the staff's PC, and I was able to recover the backup two weeks before the data loss.

From here it is the beginning of the staff totally work. To do the work, select data common to "two months ago data", "two weeks ago data", "staff's locally stored data", and visually compare and verify it. It seems that the work of verifying about 30,000 items of data one after another happened while staff changed from Friday to Sunday. Based on this data, the production team restored the data which is not perfect, and we got the chance to complete the work.

ByChirinecarlao

However, the production team had only tragedy once. Production side executives checked Toy Story 2, which is about to be completed, and decided what to "rebuild" anyway. According to Mr. Jacob, it was decided to rebuild almost from scratch, but since he was not satisfied with the content, he did not have any objection to recreate. Toy story 2 seen in DVD and Bluray as of 2017 is what Pixar completed by ordering to rebuild. However, it seems that the environmental design such as the main characters and buildings contained in the data that the production staff has restored hard has been taken over.