'Toy Story 2' – A Classic Movie Nearly Destroyed by a Single Line of Code

wsj.com

11 points·bookofjoe··6 comments

Interesting that WSJ forgot to tell this part of the story: June 2023 "Galyn Susman, the Pixar producer who saved Toy Story 2, and Lightyear director Angus MacLane were among the 75 employees laid off by Pixar in late May, reports Reuters."

Previous related:

Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012) (181 points, 2022, 91 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344516

Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012) (515 points, 2017, 253 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13417037

How Pixar Almost Lost Toy Story 2 To A Bad Backup (169 points, 2012, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3972798

Only now, days after you remarked "You messed up the title" did I realize you were poking fun at me. I may be slow, but I eventually get there....

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/toy-story-5-saved-pixar-7...

> When Pixar employees went looking for the lost data, they discovered that the backup systems were not working properly—and nobody was aware until it was too late.

I've been in several companies where we discovered that the backups didn't really work. What on earth were we paying the IT people for if they never tested file recovery?

Doing all the other things deemed more high- priority by the business (like meeting SOC-2 audit requirements; answering field questions about network architecture because people don’t read documents; scaling subsystems for customer-specific demos; yadda yadda). I would bet good money the IT people had a ticket saying we need to test the backups regularly that kept getting deprioritized.

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