The lack of a proper Disaster Recovery plan can affect anyone, not just small mom-and-pop stores or IT companies. Poor disaster recovery can even affect Woody, Buzz, and the rest of those lovable toys from the Pixar movie Toy Story.
Disaster Recovery Horror Story #6: Failed Backups Almost Ruined Toy Story 2
“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files,” said Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar. “Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, ‘Oh my god.’ I grabbed the phone…‘unplug the machine!’”
Jacob recounts that disastrous day when someone executed an incorrect command on the servers where all the movie’s files were stored. Two months and hundreds of hours of work was deleted in a matter of seconds.
- The good news: Pixar had a backup system in place.
- The bad news: The backups were not continuously tested and had been failing for a month prior to the fateful day when the movie was deleted.
Fortunately, like most Pixar movies, this story has a happy ending. By a stroke of luck, Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman had been working on the film at home and had the entire movie stored on her personal computer.
“She and I just stood up and walked out, back to her Volvo, drove across the bridge, got the machine, got some blankets, I hugged it with seatbelts, across the back seat,” said Jacob. “Drove at like 35 with blinking lights on, hoping to get a police escort. No cops saw us, so it didn’t help us.”
“Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room,” added Jacob.
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If it can happen to a big company like Pixar, it can happen to you. This is why it is so important to have a disaster recovery plan in place. This is why you should trust the IT professionals at Working Nets. We were founded to provide small businesses, like yours, with expert information technology support they needed.
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Source:
How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
