Once the department heads felt confident in the restoration, the rest of the production team was invited back to work on the film. The IT department furnished the archived work, which the team then used to restore the project and all of its assets. Supervising Technical Director Galyn Sussman requested tape backups of the film from the IT department. Despite this, panic hadn’t broken out yet. When Oren and the rest of the crew returned several hours later, the network drive was brought back online and it was discovered that only 10 percent of the film’s assets remained. More assets kept going offline, and “Directory No Longer Valid” errors stopped the work on Toy Story 2 in its tracks.Įventually every animator and every TD, everyone working on the show, goes, ‘Oh, all machines down. ‘That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody,’ recalls Oren Jacob. In 1998, Associate Technical Director Oren Jacob was working with Larry Cutler and Larry Aupperle when they began to notice elements of Woody’s outfit disappearing. Today, we are looking at the story of Toy Story 2 and how it was saved from 90 percent deletion. Little did this poor animator know that the hasty command entered into the system would result in an avalanche of errors that would nearly bring Pixar to its knees. In 1998, less than a year before the slated release date of Toy Story 2 an animator working on the film entered a command to delete files into the Unix-based, shared-network project system, intending to run a routine file cleanup. I recently stumbled across a story from the history of film from YouTuber Austin McConnell that I had never heard before. Proper data protection during production is critical, and Pixar almost learned this the hard way with Toy Story 2.

Toy story 2 live action