Oren Jacob watched the files vanish. He stood in Larry Cutler’s office at Pixar’s Richmond, California campus in 1998, staring at a directory for the character Woody on his screen. Forty files. He refreshed. Four files. Sequences dissolved while he watched. Someone had entered a Unix command on the root folder of the Toy Story 2 assets: /bin/rm -r -f *. The command did what commands do. It erased everything.
Within minutes, 90% of the film had disappeared. Two years of animation, lighting, and modeling work for 150 people, wiped in a line of code.
The team scrambled to the backup tapes. Corrupted. The backup system had died a month earlier, and nobody had tested it.
