Backup...share...telecommute...whatever necessary to save those files

[Rodney]

or... 'Why PIXAR movies really cost that much'.

 

EL_g0tyaIeE

 

Direct Link

[robcat2075]

A laptop back then didn't have lots of HD space... or did it? I wonder what it was exactly that she had a copy of.

 

 

My brother tells of working at Control Data in the 80s and watching a salesman demonstrate a super safe system they had introduced that was really two computers mirroring each other. The salesman was going to unplug one to show how one could fail and yet the system would continue to run on the other with no loss of uptime or data.

 

So he pulled the plug and everything immediately died. It turned out another salesman had done the same demo the day before by unplugging the other computer and never plugged it back in.

 

Or so the story is told.

[Rodney]

A laptop back then didn't have lots of HD space... or did it? I wonder what it was exactly that she had a copy of.

 

She had borrowed an SGI workstation so she had the entire film (more or less) copied to it before she took it home with her and then updated incrementally on a daily basis over two modems.

I believe it was the older files which would have been directly copied onto it that they were the most interested in as the newer files had been backed up properly.

As the newer files hit the upper limit of storage on the backup system it had gotten rid of older files but they weren't exactly sure which files were jettisoned.

Her backup allowed them to run that comparison.

 

Now... the other shoe dropping... was that shortly after this Lasseter and crew reviewed the film and decided it wasn't working.

They then proceeded to toss out the majority of the film and basically start from scratch with less than a year to release remaining.

 

My brother tells of working at Control Data in the 80s and watching a salesman demonstrate a super safe system they had introduced that was really two computers mirroring each other. The salesman was going to unplug one to show how one could fail and yet the system would continue to run on the other with no loss of uptime or data.

 

So he pulled the plug and everything immediately died. It turned out another salesman had done the same demo the day before by unplugging the other computer and never plugged it back in.

 

Or so the story is told.

 

Heh! There is no failsafe against the human condition.

[robcat2075]

About 25 years ago in my first CG job i once accidentally deleted about three day's work. I turned around to see if anyone had noticed but they were still all toiling away at their desks so i just started back in redoing it and never told anyone.

 

That was back when three day's work could fit on one floppy and you had to "format" floppies before you used them. Formatting the wrong floppy was the crucial mistake that day.

 

 

I recall another temporary job I had doing graphics in an office and there was a guy at the computer next to me working away on something he had been working on for a long time. Suddenly he starts screaming. The power on his computer had flicked off for a second and it was rebooting.

 

I kept one ear open to listen to the crisis meeting that developed at his desk between him and the managers. Apparently he hadn't saved anything significant for days, he had just left the computer running all the time with the project open in the program. And now it was gone.

 

 

 

Now... the other shoe dropping... was that shortly after this Lasseter and crew reviewed the film and decided it wasn't working.

They then proceeded to toss out the majority of the film and basically start from scratch with less than a year to release remaining.

 

 

D'oh!

[John Bigboote]

In the early days of Mac computing I had to share my computer with another animator, who one day was clearing the desktop and put the jobs drive in the garbage and hit 'empty trash'... then he noticed it was taking a LONG time to empty the trash...