Toy Story 2 was saved by mum on maternity leave after Pixar employee deleted it twice

As fans across the world get ready to celebrate Toy Story's 30th anniversary, they are remembering that the sequel was very nearly lost forever.

A Pixar employee erased Toy Story 2 off of the company’s servers after an erroneous command was executed, deleted more than two months and thousands of man-hours worth of work in the process. Back in 1998, the film was nearly compete and excitement was building.

But someone hit the wrong button, and all the iconic movie’s files began to disappear from the system. Oren Jacob, who was the former chief technical officer at Pixar, was an assistant technical director and he previously discussed the most terrifying moment in his career.

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“The command that had been run was most likely ‘rm -r -f *’, which – roughly speaking – commands the system to begin removing every file below the current directory,” Oren told The Next Web back in 2012, recalling the mass panic at Pixar.

“Unfortunately, someone on the system had run the command at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project and the system was recursively tracking down through the file structure and deleting its way out like a worm eating its way out from the core of an apple.”

The files were gone, and worry was replaced by horror. But hours later, there was one hope. Technical director Galyn Susman had given birth months before the catastrophic deletion. She has been working from home and had a copy of the database stored on her computer.

So another Pixar employee went to her house, wrapped her computer in blankets and brought in to restore what had been lost. After a very nervous wait they discovered that the plan had worked and their colleague's baby had pretty much saved the day for millions of other kids - and adults - who would go on to adored the film.

“Eight people met us with a plywood sheet out in the [Pixar] parking lot and, like a sedan carrying the Pharaoh, walked it into the machine room,” Oren went on. However, bosses didn’t think the movie was good enough and many parts of it had to be remade.

They are rather glad Galyn was working from home during her maternity leave. Toy Story 2 grossed approximately $245.9 million (£181million) in the United States and Canada, and went on to make $511.3 million (around £380million) worldwide.

The countdown is now on until Toy Story 5 arrivals. Like the first four movies in the franchise, it's a collaboration with Pixar and it's set hit the big screen on June 19, 2026 - and excited Disney fans have been given a first glimpse of what they can expect.

A clip of the production appeared to show a shipment of Buzz Lightyear toys crashed on a deserted island, who are then required to work together to build a raft to get back to Star Command. Elsewhere, still images showed Jessie addressing a new character called LilyPad - a green tablet with a frog-like appearance.

LilyPad, which belongs to Bonnie is believed to be following in the footsteps of Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear, and Emperor Zurg as the lead villain of the film. TikTok film account 3C Films admitted the baddie was a "bit different" to what he expected.

"It's similar to an iPad and Leap Frog tablet in real life, and although it looks very friendly, it's said to have a completely different perception on how to play with Bonnie than our toy friends in Toy Story 5," 3C Films continued in a video.

"I didn't think the tablet would have an actual personality or that it would talk, but I think it'll be really fun to see Bonnie develop 'brain rot' a short-attention span and maybe she will become a misbehaving kid."

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