Did 'Toy Story 2' almost get deleted? Here's how 'Lightyear' producer Galyn Susman saved the Pixar film

Toy Story 2 has managed to secure the rare accomplishment of holding a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes over the years, just like the first movie of the franchise. However, both the movies had quite a rough production journey. Reportedly, Pixar nearly lost the entire Toy Story 2 movie because of an accident that erased it from the studio's servers.

Pixar co-founder, Ed Catmull, retired in 2019 right after Toy Story 4 was released in theaters. Catmull was the president of both Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. In his book Creativity, Inc., he recalled the unfortunate incident of how Toy Story 2 nearly vanished.

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Thr story behind how 'Toy Story 2' almost got deleted

All the animators for the movie were already deeply engaged in production work when an unnamed employee accidentally put the command code "/bin/rm -r -f*" in the root directory of the computer system where all the files for the animated movie were kept. This code was specifically made for wiping something from a particular location in an adequate manner, but as the individual entered the particular code in the root folder, it marked everything.

Catskill remembers it as:

"First, Woody's hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. Whole sequences — poof! — were deleted from the drive."

The movie was a work in progress, and the people working day and night on it watched their work vanish right in front of their eyes. Former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar, Oren Jacobs, recalls the moment:

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody...[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files. Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, 'Oh my god.'"

It would be an understatement to call the incident a costly experience. Toy Story 2 collectively grossed almost half a billion dollars at the box office, worldwide. In that unfortunate moment, Galyn Susman appeared as a guardian angel to rescue the movie.

Fortunately, Galyn Susman was working from home as she had just become a new mother and wanted to take care of her baby. She had with her a backup copy of the animated movie. According to Oren Jacobs, Galyn's computer was "carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh."

The copy of the movie she had with her was not completely up-to-date and the crew still lost some work. However, the terrible disaster was forestalled, and the film still met the official release date.

Apart from serving as a cautionary story on the significance of backing up all your work, Toy Story 2's production history is a reminder of the hard work and struggles behind the creation of a film.