The computer wore a seatbelt.
It’s spring 1998, and Galyn Susman, Pixar’s Supervising Technical Director, is driving her Volvo through Bay Area traffic at 35mph with her hazard lights flashing.
In the backseat sits a Silicon Graphics workstation, wrapped in blankets and buckled in. On its hard drive is the last surviving copy of Toy Story 2 on Earth.
The Fatal Command That Left Toy Story 2 Deleted From Existence
Days before that desperate drive, a Pixar animator casually executes what should be routine maintenance. Fingers tap out a Unix command to clean up digital clutter:
rm -r -f *
It was the sort of house cleaning every engineer does. The problem, of course, was location. Instead of the safety of a limited folder, the command landed at the root directory of the project. Within minutes, Toy Story 2 deleted itself with recursive, irreversible precision. First a few files vanished. Then Woody’s hat, his boots, and then Woody himself vanished. On screens across Pixar, characters began to disappear, not with the drama of a villain’s plot, but with the bureaucratic efficiency of the command line. In the span of minutes, nearly 90 percent of the film evaporated.
Oren Jacob, the Associate Technical Director, saw what was happening and didn’t hesitate. “Pull the plug,” he barked. The servers went dark. The bleeding stopped. But when the machines blinked back to life, a year’s work—more than 100,000 files—had been erased.
Backup System Failures And False Security
This was the moment where panic would be warranted. But Pixar’s engineers remained calm, almost breezy. They had, after all, planned for this. The studio’s backup system, based on high-capacity tape, was their invisible shield. The tapes were fetched. IT set about restoring the project. Within forty-eight hours, the files reappeared. The project directory swelled back to its expected size. Crisis averted.
Or so it seemed.
For a week, the studio pressed on. But odd errors started creeping in. Animation “attach” operations failed. Scenes that should be showing versions in the 400s were stuck at version 20. The backup, the team realized, was incomplete and corrupted. The tape system, built to be their salvation, had quietly failed for over a month. Worse, the logs designed to flag such errors had themselves collapsed, writing only empty, reassuring zero-byte files.
Their most valuable safeguard, it turned out, was a mirage.
The Home Workstation That Rescued Pixar
In Bugville, Pixar’s complex, a kind of despair set in. Leaders gathered to tally options. They could attempt to rebuild from months-old data, losing a season of labor. They could delay the film, which seemed impossible, given Disney’s unyielding release date. Or they could admit defeat. The backup was gone. The movie was, for all practical purposes, lost.
It was at this nadir that Susman spoke up. “I have a machine at my house,” she said. Susman, recently returned from maternity leave, had been working from home, her workstation receiving nightly syncs of the project’s files. It was, at most, two weeks out of date.
In any healthy system, this wouldn’t matter. Backups are supposed to be redundant. But systems fail in ways that are both systemic and absurd. And so it was that Pixar’s future came to rest on the contents of a single computer in a family living room in Point Richmond.
Jacob and Susman drove out together, retrieved the machine, and buckled it in. They returned to the studio, headlights flashing, as though transporting a transplant organ. In the parking lot, engineers hoisted the workstation on a sheet of plywood, creating an honor guard for a digital relic. Inside, they cloned the data, and the real work began.
Inside The 72 Hour Animation Recovery Marathon
For three days, Pixar became a triage center. Engineers, animators, technical directors, all camped out, sleep-deprived and frantic, working through printouts and scripts. The process was meticulous. Out of approximately 100,000 files, seventy percent could be reconciled automatically. The remainder had to be compared by hand, each one a possible missing link. Artists from across the studio joined in, armed with sandwiches and coffee, even as a masseuse made the rounds to ease cramping hands. By Monday morning, the last file was checked. The film was back.
Recovering Then Scrapping The Entire Film
Then came the moment that transformed a technical recovery into a creative revelation. For here, most organizations would have celebrated their luck, grateful for survival. But Pixar is not like most organizations. John Lasseter and their creative leadership team, nicknamed the Pixar “Braintrust,” sat down to watch what they had saved. And what they saw, after all that drama and all that rescue, was a movie that was simply not good enough.
It’s hard to appreciate just how rare this is. Human beings, and the companies they build, have an almost pathological inability to abandon sunk costs . Psychologists call it loss aversion. The more you invest, the harder it is to walk away. The more miraculous the rescue, the greater the pressure to convince yourself that what you saved was worth saving. Here, Pixar faced an excruciating choice. They could push ahead, grateful for survival, or they could accept the unthinkable: the film needed to be rebuilt from scratch.
They chose the unthinkable. In the months that followed, Toy Story 2 was reimagined, rewritten, and largely reanimated. New characters, new arcs, new emotional weight. The “saved” film became the scaffolding for something better, an act of self-erasure, not self-preservation.
Finding Creative Courage Through Technical Disaster
It’s tempting, with stories like this, to focus only on the technical lessons. Test your backups. Implement better safeguards. Never run dangerous commands at the root level. But beneath these obvious takeaways lies something more profound about creativity itself.
We build safety nets to save ourselves from disaster, yet sometimes, the disaster is exactly what we need to see that what we were clinging to wasn’t worth keeping. The act of rescue can itself give us the courage to let go.
And that was the genius of Pixar—not just recovering from having Toy Story 2 deleted—but using that recovery as permission to delete it again. They didn’t need a safety net in the form of backup tapes or a Silicon Graphics workstation in a Volvo. They just needed a willingness, after all that work, to press delete on purpose.
And it brought the world a classic.