A New Mom Who Usually Worked From Home Saved 'Toy Story 2' The servers were abruptly shut down, but the damage was done. 90% of Toy Story 2 was gone. There was a backup system, but to make matters worse, it hadn't been working correctly for weeks.

Yes, a legendary technical disaster occurred at Pixar in 1998 where an employee accidentally ran a "deletion" command (rm -r -f *) at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project, causing roughly 90% of the film's assets to disappear from the servers in real-time. The team watched in horror as Woody’s hat, then Woody himself, and then entire sets vanished from the directory. To make matters worse, their backup system had unknowingly failed weeks earlier because the backup tape drive was full. The film was miraculously saved by Galyn Susman, the technical director, who had been working from home to care for her newborn baby. She had a "mirror" copy of the film's assets on her home computer to stay productive during her maternity leave. The team carefully transported her computer to the studio—reportedly strapped into a car seat for safety—and used it to restore the project. This event has become one of the most famous cautionary tales in computer science, leading to a total overhaul of Pixar's data management and backup protocols to prevent a similar near-extinction of a multi-million dollar creative project.