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This is something of an old video, as it was first released back in 2011, but Max mentioned briefly in his epic film vs. digital piece a few months back, so I thought it’d be good to share. Basically, the story goes that Toy Story 2, when nearly completed, was almost completely deleted from Pixar’s servers thanks to an accidental command input and was only saved thanks to pure luck and a mom working from home.
While accidents can happen anywhere, and there’s certainly been plenty of cases of footage shot on film being destroyed thanks to accident, this is certainly an example of the fragility of films existing wholly on digital formats. All it takes to completely destroy a movie stored digitally is a few errant keystrokes, whereas a film reel is at least slightly hardier stuff.