How A Newborn Baby Saved ‘Toy Story 2’ From Being Deleted

Following on from the success of the beloved Toy Story, the return of Woody, Buzz and the gang in the sequel was highly anticipated, but could have been lost forever if it weren’t for a newborn baby. 

In the months before the release of the film, when the creators had already spent some time creating each colourful scene, Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar, was in the office of producer Larry Cutler looking at a directory which contained assets for the character of Woody.

Upon refreshing the directory, the team noticed there were suddenly less and less files due to an erroneous command which had been executed. The movie was gradually being deleted off the company’s servers, leaving the creators with no choice but to call the machine room, where the main server was located, and instruct staff to cut the power.

Though Pixar had backups of its data, failure to test the backups meant creators did not realise that every time new data was being written onto the drive, older files were being removed.

Creators soon realised the files were incomplete, so Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman offered a solution by announcing that she had a machine containing the whole file tree for the film at her house, where she had been working after having recently given birth.

Susman and Jacob quickly travelled to her house to fetch the machine before carefully driving it back to the office wrapped in blankets. With all the work that had gone into the film stored on the device, the car was transformed into a $100 million machine.

The files on Susman’s machine were a couple of weeks old, but the creators managed to use them to rebuild the project as best they could. Though several thousand files were lost forever, it was enough to create at least one version Toy Story 2 – even though much of the film later ended up getting remade anyway following an updated pitch.