Do Your Backups, People
One delete command, a broken backup, and a very lucky home computer.
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In 1998, an animator at Pixar watched Woody disappear. First his hat vanished from the file system. Then his boots. Then the rest of him.
Someone had run /bin/rm -r -f * on the server holding Toy Story 2. The command does exactly what it says: delete everything, no questions asked. By the time somebody pulled the plug, about 90 percent of the film was gone. Two years of work.
Not a problem, right? That's what backups are for.
Pixar's backups had been failing quietly for about a month. Nobody had noticed.
Maternity leave
The movie survived for one reason. Galyn Susman, the film's supervising technical director, had recently had a baby and was working from home. Her computer there held a copy of the film, refreshed regularly so she could keep working.
They drove the machine back to the studio, plugged it in, and copied the film over. Most of it came back.
Toy Story 2 went on to make about half a billion dollars at the box office. And Pixar got the lesson in its purest form: a backup only counts if someone checks that it works.
My favorite detail: the rescued version isn't the one you saw. Months after the file rescue, Pixar decided the movie wasn't good enough and remade most of it in nine months. Toy Story 2 was deleted twice. Once by accident, once on purpose.
It keeps happening
In 2019, MySpace confirmed it had lost every song uploaded between 2003 and 2015 in a server migration. Around 50 million tracks from 14 million artists. The company's statement: there is no way to recover the data.
Ten years earlier, the T-Mobile Sidekick had already shown what happens when the cloud is the only copy. Its servers, run by a Microsoft subsidiary, lost the contacts, photos, and calendars of around 800,000 users. The compensation was a $100 voucher.
And in 2017, GitLab had five backup mechanisms in place when a tired admin deleted the production database. None of them worked. What saved the company was a manual snapshot a colleague happened to have made six hours earlier.
Five backups. Zero backups. Same thing, apparently.
Paper too
This is not a digital invention. In 1973, the US National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis burned for 22 hours and took up to 18 million military service files with it. No duplicates, no microfilm. Archivists still reconstruct veterans' records from scattered sources today.
The US Patent Office burned down in 1836 with the entire record of American invention inside, and the government's restore plan was asking inventors to mail in their own copies. About 2,845 patents came back. Roughly 7,000 are still lost.
There's a second way to lose everything, by the way: keep it safe in a format nothing can read. The BBC put a digital snapshot of Britain on laserdiscs in 1986, and sixteen years later the discs were nearly unreadable because the players had disappeared. The book that inspired the project, written on parchment in 1086, is still perfectly legible.
Three, two, one
I spent last week doing my own small version of all this. I exported my Medium and my Substack archives, and both turned out to be missing more than I expected. I wrote up what a real Substack backup looks like separately.
The fix: Three copies, two kinds of storage, one of them somewhere else. The memorable version of that rule came from a photographer, not an IT department.
There's even a date for it: World Backup Day, March 31. On purpose one day before April Fools'.
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