How Toy Story 2 was almost lost

Even the pros have close calls sometimes. In this video, two Pixar employees explain how the files that comprised the film Toy Story 2 were almost lost as a result of an erroneous delete command and a backup routine that had stopped working properly. The only thing that saved Pixar from having to devote a year to reconstructing the lost files: the film's technical director was doing a lot of work at home and had a copy of the files on her home computer.

Moral of the story: verify that your backup routine is producing readable backups -- and be very, very careful when typing Unix/Linux "rm" commands!