How Pixar recovered Toy Story 2 after a Unix command deleted nearly the entire film in 1998
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Oops: Twenty-eight years ago, Pixar nearly lost 90% of Toy Story 2's digital files – not because a system crashed, but because someone ran a routine Unix command that engineers had been using for years without a second thought. The command /bin/rm -r -f instructs the system to recursively delete everything under a directory without asking for confirmation. At Pixar in 1998, it was apparently executed in the wrong location.
The studio's animation pipeline at the time ran across a network of Unix and Linux machines holding hundreds of thousands of production files. Artists and technical staff had broad access to both personal workspaces and shared production directories. The setup made collaboration easier, but meant a routine cleanup command could reach critical files if issued from the wrong directory.
According to people familiar...
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