Hey, brother!
Ben, have you ever lost a TON of data at a crucial moment, because *inhales*
I have.
Sophomore year of college; it was exam week, and I was studying in the library for once, and
not just because they were giving out free coffee after 10 PM...
but, yeah, mostly because they were giving out free coffee after 10 PM.
Look, you don't have to like coffee, and if you don't want to, you are totally entitled to your own opinion.
But if you don't, you're wrong. And I hate you.
Hello, friend.
*slurping*
But that night, coffee was not my friend, Ben, nor was gravity. See,
my super smart college brain was like,
"Hmm, maybe I shouldn't put my coffee on the desk with my computer, lest it spill and ruin everything."
Which, admittedly, was a good threat to identify, but I was very poor at solving the threat,
because my solution was not: put the cup lower where it is physically impossible for it to spill on things,
but to put it higher on the little shelf above the desk.
*siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh*
It spilled.
Right on my computer, and I only lost all my semester's worth of notes!
On exam week!
[Sarcastically] So, that was great.
Yeah, that sucked,
but, see, now imagine that story except instead of me, it was Pixar,
and instead of a semester's worth of notes,
it was "Toy Story 2."
This is that story.
[THEME MUSIC]
J and Ben: Hey, brother!
So, when you work at a big company,
typically you and all the other employees will all work off of the same, giant network drive.
But, depending on, like, what your role is in the company,
you will have different permission to access different parts of that drive.
But at Pixar, things are a little bit different.
Because everyone is working on different parts of the same thing,
everyone needs access to everyone else's stuff to make sure that everything is working.
And by everything, I mean that within a single shot,
there can be people working on
the lighting, people working on Jessie, people working on Woody, and other people working on Woody's hat.
Literally takes a village, so
yeah, everyone's fingers are literally in everyone else's work.
But, that's by design.
And I do mean everyone, top to bottom, especially in the early days of Pixar, where
literally, if you knew how to manipulate the code a little bit, you could have gotten access to like, Steve Jobs' or John Lasseter's computer.
Which brings us to "Toy Story 2."
"Toy Story 2" was Pixar's third film ever,
and their first sequel, and
the fact that it was a sequel is kind of important.
See, when Pixar and Disney came to an agreement about distribution,
they agreed that Pixar would produce seven films:
three to be released theatrically, and four straight to DVD.
And, if you're like me, the words
"straight to DVD" just mean one thing:
that it... kind of sucks.
And the very idea of Pixar releasing something straight to video just, like,
makes me want to cringe, because it's Pixar. They-
they don't do that, everything they do is amazing!
And "Toy Story 2" was supposed to be the first of these direct to video projects.
And, to be fair to Pixar, that was the standard practice at the time.
Animated movies just didn't get theatrical releases of sequels,
especially at Disney.
In fact, the only time they had ever released an animated sequel in theaters to that point
was in 1990 with "The Rescuers Down Under."
Now, the reason studios do this is to train the next wave of animators and directors.
Let them work on a straight to DVD sequel, get their feet wet before moving them up to the big leagues.
Which, you know, makes sense, and that's what Pixar's plan was.
The problem is that they realized "Toy Story 2" was just....
TOO good.
Also, Pixar solved this problem by allowing their next wave of people to train on the shorts you see before the movies.
But anyway, Pixar couldn't imagine "Toy Story 2" not being in theaters when they themselves saw it as better than "Toy Story" 1.
So, they shifted gears. But, unfortunately, most of the staff was already working on "A Bug's Life,"
the next movie already planned to be a theatrical release.
And when you couple that with the fact that "Toy Story 2" was supposed to be a straight to video release,
You're left with a fairly small staff working on "Toy Story 2."
Meaning that crisis is harder to cope with.
And, oh my goodness, was there crisis?
Allow me to introduce you to...
I know, right?!
/bin/rm-r-f* is the villain of this story.
Now, to be clear though, I have no freaking clue what that little line of code means, OR
I didn't know. But roughly translated, it mostly means...
"DELETE EVERYTHING!"
Yzma: Why do we even HAVE that lever?
Have you ever wondered in movies why there's even a self destruct button to hit?
Agreed! It is a great question,
but the reason animated movies might want to delete a bunch of stuff is because
they often involve a lot of trial and error and
"file space," which I said in air quotes for reasons you will understand in a few seconds.
So, you would use this to clear out a subset of unwanted files,
and it would remove everything below that directory.
So, like, in my mind's eye, I'm imagining some massive board chart, and, like,
WAY down here you have some tiny folder, and
you're clearing out the contents of that and there's nothing beneath it. And that's what you might use that for.
But what happened is that somebody used the command on this folder,
way up here, the one titled...
"'Toy Story 2' and everything to do with your company's future."
Yep. That's a BIG cup of coffee.
Fortunately, a guy named Oren Jacob, the chief tech officer at Pixar at the time,
happened to be looking at some directories at the time, as you do,
and he noticed upon refreshing his page that, all of a sudden,
Woody and Rex were gone. And then he refreshed again, and Ham was gone, and then....
(whispering dramatically) ...nothing.
I like to image that the next few seconds at Pixar went something like this:
OH MY GOD! PULL THE PLUG! PULL THE PLUG! SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN OVER THERE! WE'RE BURNING!
Okay, there was probably less fire, but
they did make a frantic call to the master server and have them pull the plug on it for the entire company, so
at that point, nobody could work on anything for any movie until the whole system rebooted.
"But, J," I hear you saying. "Surely a technologically advanced company like Pixar made backups of all of its files, right?"
*nervous chuckle* "Right?"
Guys, of course they made backups of their files!
Sort of. Actually, back then, you made backups on tapes.
And for everyone born after the year 2000,
THIS is a tape.
You used to, ah, like, put it in a machine and watch movies off of it,
and afterwards, you had to rewind it if you wanted to watch it again.
*Phew* Dark ages.
Actually, this tape in particular is called "The Year in Carlin 2000,"
and is a home movie my dad made of everything our family did that year.
Man, I wonder what level of Patreon access to this would be worth.
And let me be clear, it's not just the year 2000, it is all of the years.
(crashing)
Where was I?
Ah, yes. Tapes like this, or maybe a little more advanced than this,
were used to back up entire digitally animated movies.
And in case you were wondering, because I know you're just dying to know about data storage specs,
tapes like that could hold up to 4 gigs, which is
more than I would have expected, but still not that much.
I mean, 4 gigs *pfff* that's laughable, right? I mean, the video I'm literally filming right now has probably already taken up more than 4 gigs.
I mean, at a giant company like Pixar, where everyone is working on the same project at the same time to--
they're probably using a gig every few minutes, right? But surprisingly, nope!
All of the data for "Toy Story 2," all of it, took up 10 gigs.
I mean, you probably, like, stream more video than that on your phone every month.
So how big of an issue can it be? 10 gigs. Just go reboot from the tapes, right?
Agreed. It should not have been THAT big of a deal, except
that the backup system wasn't really working. I mean, it WAS working,
just not how you want it to.
Ideally, you would get an alert every time a tape was about to be full, and then you would just switch out the tapes,
and, even more ideally, you'd just be switching the tapes out regularly so that wouldn't ever be a problem and you never lose data.
But, they weren't switching them out regularly
nor did they get the alert, because the alert itself
was so small that it took up zero bytes of data.
Now, I'm absolutely not an expert on this, but the way I think it was supposed to work was
that when you got, like, all the way down to this much storage left,
that alert is supposed to pop up.
But because it took up so little space,
that the tape literally fills the capacity, and then the alert has no room to even present itself, so it's sort of like
a self-disabling thing, which is not what you want.
Instead, the drive did continue to do what it was supposed to do,
and save the new information, but it was also dumping the old information.
And when they pulled the tape to reboot the data,
what they were left with was kind of like a Jenga tower that's about to fall over, like
yeah, the top few layers are nice and solid 'cause you just built them, but
they're standing on this veeeeery precarious tower that's missing a lot of pieces.
#TrustNoJenga
And what's worse is that because it was mostly the newer data that had been saved,
they didn't realize what they were missing until about a week later when, all of a sudden,
stuff just stopped working, 'cause
the foundation was just gone.
When I say foundation, I mean, like,
90% of everything. That- th- that- that's a lot!
To put it bluntly, they were literally dead in the water.
They would just basically have to start over
from the beginning, and there simply wasn't time until the premiere date to do that.
"Toy Story 2" was gone, and possibly the future of Pixar with it.
Until...
Galyn Susman realized she had a full copy of the movie
on her computer at home.
Earlier in the year, Galyn had been out of the office on maternity leave, but had
made a copy of the movie so that she could continue to work on it from home,
and she would then just be fed incremental updates as they happened at work.
I can only image the moment of realization. Apparently, they were all sitting in this brain trust meeting,
they'd been sitting there for 30 minutes in silence, just...
"What do we do?" And all of a sudden,
*Dramatic gasp*
I have it on my drive at home!
So, her and Jacob got in her car and
drove home, secured her computer in the car with
blankets and seat belts and everything they could do to tie it down,
drove back to the office at like, 35 miles an hour with the flashers on.
I think they were hoping for a police escort.
Gah, I can't even tell you how stressed out I would be moving that machine.
I mean, could you image if you dropped it?
But they didn't drop it. They made it inside the building, plugged it in,
booted it up, and BOOM.
"Toy Story 2" was there.
It hadn't been updated for the past couple of weeks, so they did lose that time,
but they were able to put together the rest of the movie,
and "Toy Story 2" and Pixar were saved.
Man, how thankful was everyone that Galyn decided to have a baby earlier that year, right?
Speaking of which, have I mentioned that my wife, Beth, is pregnant?
[Dramatically] These socks are amazing!
Guys, thanks for watching. As always, please remember to like this video if you haven't already, and subscribe so you don't miss any future Pixar action from us.
If you wanna learn the secret, true story of Andy's dad and Woody's origin, you can check out this video right here.
And if you wanna learn the origin of Al from Al's Toy Barn, you can click this video right here.
But Ben, that's all I've got for you today, man. I will see you in another life, brother.