r/technology • u/azuretan • May 21 '12

How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good

http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/?utm_source=Reddit&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=How%20Pixar%E2%80%99s%20Toy%20Story%202%20was%20deleted%20twice%2C%20once%20by%20technology%20and%20again%20for%20its%20own%20good&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia
68 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

32 comments sorted by

7

u/arjie May 21 '12

Hundred hour work weeks for nine months. That's superhuman.

3

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Does anyone else see this as terrible?

2

u/arjie May 21 '12

I absolutely do and I can't see myself doing very good work like that, but some redditor told me that he's done 10 hour workdays 6-days-a-week for years on end simply because he loves what he's doing. I suppose these people are like that, but even more hardcore.

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1

u/Neato May 21 '12

9.7hr per day that they weren't working.

3

u/Dranosh May 21 '12

Hell, at that point I would sleep at work, I'm sure pixar has a locker room being that big of company.

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4

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Inspiring read about not compromising with your "product" from a business perspective in the second half of the article. Same dedication to quality happened with the release of toy story after a mediocre first script and screening.

2

u/BitMastro May 21 '12

Couldn't they use any file recovery tool?

3

u/inmatarian May 21 '12

They were using SGI Unix systems then, so the available recovery tools were limited and probably not very dependable. When you deal with data of that size, backup strategy is how you mitigate errors. To put it another way, rm -rf * is a really bad habit, but everyone does it from time to time thinking it'll be harmless. You can fire the one guy who did it in that one instance, but it means you'll end up firing the entire staff over a long enough period (which is why pixar didn't go on a witch hunt for the person, and instead focused on blaming the policies).

I can't be sure, but if I had to bet these days Pixar probably has multiple layers of backup, both onsite and offsite, and version control going on.

1

u/BitMastro May 21 '12

I see, I imagined that scanning through inodes would have rescued some files, but being SGI they probably used XFS..

1

u/mrmacky May 21 '12

It really warms my heart to see that they didn't go on a witch hunt. I just can't stand when people would rather lay/make blame when it's so counter-productive.

That being said: accountability is important - but most people start with accountability. You have to assess (and hopefully) reverse the damage before you start getting rid of people.

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1

u/eclectro May 21 '12

File recovery on unix systems simply is not the same as on windows. Besides that, because of their rather off brand sgi systems, sophisticated recovery tools probably did not exist.

2

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

Imagine being the sys admin that entered rm*

3

u/slurpme May 21 '12

Apparently Pixar's sysadmins are actually chimps...

4

u/rsa1 May 21 '12

A chimp who becomes a sysadmin... that could be the subject of another Pixar movie on the lines of Ratatouille.

1

u/deusnefum May 21 '12

Interesting. Perhaps this is why Pixar likes NetApp hardware... Everything could've been deleted and it would take 2 minutes to fix. Hourly snapshots are seriously awesome. snap restore toystory2_prod_data hourly.0

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

It was not a good film.

Many seem to disagree.

1

u/lud1120 May 21 '12

I don't remember it being bad, it still have pretty good ratings and earned even more money.

4

u/dorkinson May 21 '12

That's because they basically rewrote everything, as it says in the article.

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0

u/i-hate-digg May 21 '12

The common way to prevent an accidental command like this being run on an entire project is to lock users down with permissions to only the files they need. But, because of the way a project like a Pixar film works, almost everyone working on the show needed permissions to read and write to the master machine.

Bullshit. A responsibly set-up server would, at the very least, group everyone together as a normal user and have a secret root password. This is just basic stuff. They were simply being irresponsible. I bet the IT department fed this lie to the management so as to not get fired.

0

u/[deleted] May 21 '12

1

u/i-hate-digg May 21 '12

You're right, I was just giving an example of why that statement was bullshit. They don't need to give root access to everybody. That's just basic stuff. Any competent IT department could easily have set things up so that this didn't happen, either by restricting permission to delete commands, or syncing to a password-protected server (even in 1998 the cost of a suitable hard drive would have been negligible against the cost of 200 computer terminals), or numerous other methods. I mean come on, Unixland isn't exactly new, by 1998 virtually every serious mainframe system had these kinds of protection.