How Toy Story 2 Almost Got Deleted: Stories From Pixar Animation: ENTV
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN shares it as a classic backup and operations cautionary tale.
What it is
Pixar staff tell the story of how Toy Story 2 was almost deleted from the studio's computers and was saved by a home computer backup.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2016 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec alexpotato · 2026-07 · on “Honey, We Bought an AI Story”
Took my kids to see Toy Story 5. While watching it, I thought about AI generated content. I have never personally met anyone who worked on any of the Toy Story movies. I know, from documentaries etc, who Brad Bird and John Lasseter are. I've also watched the video [0] about how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted (which I highly recommend if you are in storage, DevOps or SRE). There are other movies like the Wild Robot that: - had big emotional impact on me (b/c I'm a parent) - are 100% animated - I have zero idea who made them I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the
Recommends danso · 2016-04 · on “How Toy Story 2 Got Deleted Twice, Once on Accident, Again on Purpose”
I was surprised not to see this mentioned in the front page discussion about the guy who supposedly rm rf'ed his web hosting service [1] The (amusing and animated) YouTube video link has since been changed: [this video] I like using the Pixar incident when working with students who are programming at the command-line for the first time, as an illustration of how powerful the command-line is (or rather, how much modern systems wrap things in safety layers). The disaster that befell the web-hosting guy was not just one line of code, but other errors and bugs (variables not being set) and overall badly designed systems for automation. But this Pixar incident, if it happened the way described, is the
Cites CharlesW · 2022-02 · on “A baby saved ‘Toy Story 2’ from near complete deletion (2021)”
"Pixar Studio Stories: The Movie Vanishes", narrated by Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman: [this video] "Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?", Quora answer by Oren Jacob: [LINK]