Yeah, have good backups--especially for things worth millions of dollars. Face palm.

And, working at home is good.

Not checking the automated backups for months is criminal.

Having everything in one directory is stupid too. If they'd had a decent file structure it would have taken rm -r * (not just rm *) to delete everything. And only administrators should have access to delete everything; if they'd had any Unix administrators they'd've noticed the backups failing.

Also, anyone heard of source control? Wow. These are solved problems, and they were even back then.

This should be re-titled, How pixar got a new IT Dept.
and a security audit.

Pixar: awesome at film-making, not so hot on IT infrastructure.

Apart from the fact that ordinary operators were apparently running commands with superuser privileges, any UNIX administrator with a modicum of common sense would have added an alias to the rm
command to modify the way that it operates by asking the user whether they are *really sure* that they want to delete everything on the system. This has been pretty much standard operating practice for every UNIX variant and every shell environment for about thirty years.

All the issues of what they should have done aside... I still love the section with driving the Very Precious Computer to the office, and bearing it in on a litter.

Or don't use UNIX... No rm * on other systems...

"Or don't use UNIX... No rm * on other systems..."

Sure, because nobody would ever type "del *". :-)

Seriously, guys, the whole thing was a silly video labeled "99% true, as far as we recall". I'm sure there's some truth to it, but I wouldn't spend a lot of time second-guessing Pixar's technology skillz over this. They did create Renderman and a whole stack of cool technologies, and make a series of amazingly good movies. That's got to count for something!