Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)
I was at Pixar when this happened, but I didn't hear all of the gory details, as I was in the Tools group, not Production. My memory of a conversation I had with the main System Administrator as to why the backup was not complete was that they were using a 32-bit version of tar and some of the filesystems being backed up were larger than 2GB. The script doing the backup did not catch the error. That may seems sloppy, but this sort of thing happens in the Real World all the time. At the risk of spilling secrets, I'll tell a story about the animation system, which I worked on (in the 1996-97 time frame).The Pixar animation system at the time was written in K&R C and one of my tasks was to migrate it to ANSI C. As I did that I learned that there were aspects of this code that felt like a school assignment that had escaped from the lab. While searching for a bug, I noticed that the write() call that saved the animation data for a shot wasn't checked for errors. This seemed like a bad idea, since at the time the animation workstations were SGI systems with relatively small SCSI disks that could fill up easily. When this happened, the animation system usually would crash and work would be lost. So, I added an error check, and also code that would save the animation data to an NFS volume if the write to the local disk failed. Finally, it printed a message assuring the animator that her files were safe and it emailed a support address so they could come help. The animators loved it! I had left Pixar by the time the big crunch came in 1999 to remake TS2 in just 9 months, so I didn't see that madness first hand. But I'd like to think that TS2 is just a little, tiny bit prettier thanks to my emergency backup code that kept the animators and lighting TDs from having to redo shots they barely had time to do right the first time.The point is that one would like to think that a place like Pixar is a model of Software Engineering Excellence, but the truth is more complex. Under the pressures of Production deadlines, sometime you just have to get it to work and hope you can clean it up later. I see the same things at NASA, where, for the most part, only Flight Software gets the full on Software Engineering treatment.