10 Movies That Were Nearly Lost Completely
1. Toy Story 2
Although Toy Story 2 wasn't lost for years and then rediscovered like the other entries on this list, Pixar's opus was nearly lost during development had it not been for a stroke of luck.
Original development of the film started in 1995. In 1998, however, before it was completely finished, Oren Jacob - associate technical director at the time - noticed something strange going on with files containing the character assets. One by one the files had started to delete themselves due to a scripting error on the directory, causing the system to wipe everything they had worked on. Jacob's first reaction was to pull the plug before anything else got deleted, and when they booted the system back up they found that 90% of the movie had disappeared.
Luckily, one of the technical directors – Galyn Susman - was off on maternity leave and working from home. Because her work was shipped digitally to her personal workstation, it meant that she had backup files on her hard drive. She rushed to the studio to recover the work that had been lost and saved the day. Had Susman not been working from home, Toy Story 2 would have never seen the light of day, lost forever in some digital hell.