How Pixar Almost Lost $497 Million?

Pixar almost lost the Toy Story franchise due to a lack of data backup.

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When you’re Pixar, dealing with large files is a daily task.

Each movie, from Finding Nemo to The Incredibles, involves an immense amount of soundtracks, 3D assets, animation files and more. These large files are large because of the enormous amount of hyper realistic detailing that goes into every film or game. 

Toy Story 2 was as commercially successful as its predecessor. It was 1999’s highest-grossing animated film, earning $497.4 million worldwide, and became the third highest-grossing animated film of all time. Just behind The Lion King and Aladdin — Wikipedia

At Pixar, creativity and innovation is held with the highest regard. After countless hours and sleepless nights, the studio developed a series of illustrations, animations and more, that perfectly fit their audience. 

But what if the worst occurs: all files are somehow deleted? 

This was the case for Pixar Studios, as they were working on Toy Story 2. 

Did Pixar almost lose the “Toy Story” franchise due to a lack of data backup?

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Ed Catmull the co-founder of Pixar described this saga in his book, “Creativity, Inc.” that around 90% of the entire production files of Toy Story 2 were deleted just because of a single mistake.

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All of the work that had been done on the film to date was nearly lost in 1998 when one of the animators, while routinely clearing out some files on his computer, accidentally hit delete on the root folder of Toy Story 2 assets. The story got worse; the backup systems in place were unfortunately not doing what they needed to do, leading to a bit of chaos.  

After an emergency meeting of Pixar executives, and due to one lucky “work from home” stint, the files were recovered.

The film’s supervising technical director had given birth to a baby in the prior year, meaning that while she was working from home she had almost all of the files on her personal laptop. 

Millions worth of money saved by pure luck. 

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Pixar, a company that was valued at almost $2 billion in 1998, had a flagship film saved by sheer luck and good due diligence by an employee. Will companies in 2022 be this lucky, in a similar situation? 

SlikSafe could be an alternative to traditional file sharing platforms; but why? 

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SlikSafe is a decentralized, end-to-end-encrypted files backup and sharing platform.

What this means is that any file that you store on SlikSafe are stored on a geographically distributed decentralized storage. Each file is first encrypted and then distributed over a network of nodes all around the world. 

So how is this unique? 

1. Files are never lost at Slik – All files on Slik are distributed over a network of 10,000+ nodes around the world. We replicate your encrypted data over these nodes, such that there is always a copy of your file. This allows you to get your data back in every eventuality. 

2. Slik cannot look into your data even if we ever wanted to. Since all your data is end-to-end encrypted using military grade AES-256 encryption, Slik will never be able to open even one single file, even if we put multiple supercomputers together.

3. Security against ransomware attacks. Since all files are stored on the Filecoin network of nodes, your files are secure and immutable. Thus, even if a bad actor wanted, they would be unable to interfere while you work on your files. 

4. Private File sharing. Even though all your files are encrypted and stored on a decentralized storage, you can still easily share and collaborate on your files with your team. You can share folders with a simple link, or by entering their email address. 

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Conclusion

Having the right kind of data backup ensures that your data is immutable and never lost is a boon for any enterprise company, especially film studios. At Slik we do just that and are endlessly innovating to provide the best in class user experience.

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We are on a mission to give people a world-class experience, without compromising on privacy and ownership of data. We believe your data is yours alone, from the files you share online to the photos you take on your phones.

As a SlikSafe user, all your files are behind your unique passphrase. So they are always under your control. Is that something that you’d like? 

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Try SlikSafe today!

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