My recollection of the details is lacking but this jives with what I remember about a talk I attended by a Pixar sysadmin. I think there was only a couple slide

My recollection of the details is lacking but this jives with what I remember about a talk I attended by a Pixar sysadmin. I think there was only a couple slides about it since it was just one part of a "journey from there to here" presentation about how they managed and versioned large binary assets with Perforce. There are other anecdotes online about this catastrophic data loss and backup failure but I think it was, funny enough, the propensity for some end users of Perforce to mirror the entire repository that saved their bacon. I say funny because this is something a Perforce administrator will generally bark at you about since your sync of this enormous monolithic repo would be accompanied by an associated server side process that would run as long as your sync took to finish and thanks to some weird quirks of the Perforce SCM long running processes were bad and would/(could?) fuck up everyone else's day. In fact I think a recommendation from Pixar was to automatically kill long running processes server side and encourage smaller workspaces. Anyway, I digress. They were able to piece it together using local copies from certain workstations that contained all or most of the repo. Bad practices ended up saving the day.