When most people think of a “disaster” they think of hurricanes, floods, fires, etc. While those are also important to think of when keeping your information intact, most IT professionals will tell you that simply not having your information backed up correctly qualifies as a disaster. CALL TODAY: 505.899.4492
This is the sequence of events that led to Pixar nearly losing Toy Story 2 as told by and Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman and Associate Technical Director Oren Jacob:
• On UNIX and LINUX machines there is a command “RM*” that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. This is the type of system that Toy Story 2 was being created on.
• Someone ran that command where all of the Toy Story 2 files were kept and things started disappearing.
• Even after Oren’s call down to the Systems team, nearly everything was erased on their primary system in about 20 seconds.
• According to Galyn, if 20-30 people working for a solid year, they wouldn’t be able to re-create all the work that had been lost.
• They had “back-ups” but found out that they had failed for the past month and they were, in actuality, non-existent.
• However, since Galyn was often taking care of her children at home, she kept a copy of the film at her house so she could occasionally work on it there.
• When they carefully transported her computer from her house back to Pixar, the entire film was intact and as it had been before the “RM*” command was run.
So, as it turns out, Pixar completely lucked out. If Galyn had not been working at her house, the film would have been lost and needed to have been completely recreated. In today’s day and age, this type of scenario can easily be avoided by utilizing the cloud.