<story><title>Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)</title><url>https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amenod</author><text>When disk space is limited and you are working with large files, you need to clean up after yourself. And human make mistakes. I am not sure if this still does anything in newer rm, but it used to be a common mistake:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    $ rm -rf &amp;#x2F; home&amp;#x2F;myusername&amp;#x2F;mylargedir&amp;#x2F;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
(note the extra space after slash)&lt;p&gt;The real solution is comprised of:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    * backups (which are restored periodically to ensure they contain everything)
    * proper process which makes accidental removal harder (DCVS &amp;amp; co.)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item><item><author>stale2002</author><text>What the hell.  How do people just go around throwing rm -rf s so willy nilly.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>&amp;gt; I never understood the attitude of some companies to fire an employee immediately if they make a mistake such as accidentally deleting some files. If you keep this employee, then you can e pretty sure he&amp;#x27;ll never made that mistake again.&lt;p&gt;I did fire an employee who deleted the entire CVS repository.&lt;p&gt;Actually, as you say, I didn&amp;#x27;t fire him for deleting the repo.  I fired him the &lt;i&gt;second&lt;/i&gt; time he deleted the entire repo.&lt;p&gt;However there&amp;#x27;s a silver lining: this is what led us (actually Ian Taylor IIRC) to write the CVS remote protocol (client &amp;#x2F; server source control).  before that it was all over NFS, though the perp in question had actually logged into the machine and done rm -rf on it directly(!).&lt;p&gt;(Nowadays we have better approaches than CVS but this was the mid 90s)</text></item><item><author>lokedhs</author><text>I never understood the attitude of some companies to fire an employee immediately if they make a mistake such as accidentally deleting some files. If you keep this employee, then you can e pretty sure he&amp;#x27;ll never made that mistake again. If you fire him and hire someone else, that person might not have had the learning experience of completely screwing up a system.&lt;p&gt;I think that employees actually makes less mistakes and are more productive if they don&amp;#x27;t have be worried about being fired for making a mistake.</text></item><item><author>woliveirajr</author><text>The biggest difference, I think, was leaving the hunting for a head for a second moment, or even not doing it at all.&lt;p&gt;Commitment would be very different if people were being asked to help while some heads were rolling. Because you&amp;#x27;re a real team when everybody is going in the same direction. Any call on &amp;quot;people, work hard do recover while we&amp;#x27;re after the moron who deleted everything&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t have done it.&lt;p&gt;You just commit to something when you know that you won&amp;#x27;t be under the fire if you do something wrong without knowing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aidos</author><text>Day 1 in my first job in the UK I ran an &amp;quot;update crucial_table set crucial_col = null&amp;quot; without a where clause on production. Turned out there were no backups. Luckily the previous day&amp;#x27;s staging env had come down from live, so that saved most of the data.&lt;p&gt;What most people don&amp;#x27;t realize is that very few places have a real (tested) backup system.&lt;p&gt;_goes off to check backups_</text></comment>
<story><title>Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production? (2012)</title><url>https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amenod</author><text>When disk space is limited and you are working with large files, you need to clean up after yourself. And human make mistakes. I am not sure if this still does anything in newer rm, but it used to be a common mistake:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    $ rm -rf &amp;#x2F; home&amp;#x2F;myusername&amp;#x2F;mylargedir&amp;#x2F;
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
(note the extra space after slash)&lt;p&gt;The real solution is comprised of:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    * backups (which are restored periodically to ensure they contain everything)
    * proper process which makes accidental removal harder (DCVS &amp;amp; co.)&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item><item><author>stale2002</author><text>What the hell.  How do people just go around throwing rm -rf s so willy nilly.</text></item><item><author>gumby</author><text>&amp;gt; I never understood the attitude of some companies to fire an employee immediately if they make a mistake such as accidentally deleting some files. If you keep this employee, then you can e pretty sure he&amp;#x27;ll never made that mistake again.&lt;p&gt;I did fire an employee who deleted the entire CVS repository.&lt;p&gt;Actually, as you say, I didn&amp;#x27;t fire him for deleting the repo.  I fired him the &lt;i&gt;second&lt;/i&gt; time he deleted the entire repo.&lt;p&gt;However there&amp;#x27;s a silver lining: this is what led us (actually Ian Taylor IIRC) to write the CVS remote protocol (client &amp;#x2F; server source control).  before that it was all over NFS, though the perp in question had actually logged into the machine and done rm -rf on it directly(!).&lt;p&gt;(Nowadays we have better approaches than CVS but this was the mid 90s)</text></item><item><author>lokedhs</author><text>I never understood the attitude of some companies to fire an employee immediately if they make a mistake such as accidentally deleting some files. If you keep this employee, then you can e pretty sure he&amp;#x27;ll never made that mistake again. If you fire him and hire someone else, that person might not have had the learning experience of completely screwing up a system.&lt;p&gt;I think that employees actually makes less mistakes and are more productive if they don&amp;#x27;t have be worried about being fired for making a mistake.</text></item><item><author>woliveirajr</author><text>The biggest difference, I think, was leaving the hunting for a head for a second moment, or even not doing it at all.&lt;p&gt;Commitment would be very different if people were being asked to help while some heads were rolling. Because you&amp;#x27;re a real team when everybody is going in the same direction. Any call on &amp;quot;people, work hard do recover while we&amp;#x27;re after the moron who deleted everything&amp;quot; wouldn&amp;#x27;t have done it.&lt;p&gt;You just commit to something when you know that you won&amp;#x27;t be under the fire if you do something wrong without knowing it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeri</author><text>Yup, I did something like that command once, to a project developed over 3 months by 5 people without a backup policy (university group project). Luckily, this was in the days when most of the work was done on non-networked computers, so we cobbled everything together from partial source trees on floppies, hunkered down for a week to hammer out code and got back to where we were before. It&amp;#x27;s amazing how fast you can write a piece of code when you&amp;#x27;ve already written it once before.&lt;p&gt;That was the day I started backing up everything.</text></comment>