The tech of 1999 is certainly underestimated today

Still, in 1999 I had a PII 333MHz and 10GB HD (and Windows 98, sigh)

But reading about the history of Pixar, the difficulties (in the first Toy Story) involved the workflow of creating a full-feature film (apart from all the other problems they had)

So I'm guessing, since Toy Story 2 was their 3rd feature film, things were still a bit raw (especially given their fast pace)

How is that underestimated, a world of 10GB Hardrives when that's much less than the base package of dropbox these days. Managing the terabytes of data required for the movie back then was a much more difficult task.

What is underestimated is what one could do with it.

Sure, 10GB fits in a usb stick today (or better, fits in a 3 year old one)

And managing the amount of data was certainly a challenge.

If you see the first Toy Story today you can think of that being rendered in real time by a modern graphic card easily.

But still, they had what was available and managed to do all kinds of tricks

Now see what they could do in 1984 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYbPzyvResc

My comments are specifically about data storage. It was much harder to store terabytes back then.

Did you just decide to not read the part where he said "Not that you would"? He was making a point, not actually suggesting that they use Dropbox before it was invented to make backups of their multi million dollar movie production.

"Not that you would" Implies that you could. I was pointing out that they could not, for two rather poignant reasons. I didn't mean to do it offensively, but the point is that syncing and managing the huge amount of data that they have would be difficult and impractical over the internet even today, and this was also 13 years ago. Especially then, maintaining a single "master" copy on a single linux machine was in fact a pretty decent solution to the problem.

^ This. However wow it's been that long? My point was a single linux box seems "Low tech" considering you need a render farm just to produce the movie. Also they were clearly referring to assets and not the rendered film (Hats, sets etc.. getting deleted) which is 1000x worse.

The infrastructure to maintain authority on terabytes of data on late 90's hardware in a distributed fashion would be a pretty significant amount of development effort.

It'd be much easier to just get a giant RAID NAS, and manage it all there, which should in theory be quite sufficient assuming you are keeping proper backups. Many of the render nodes will have copies of the needed data, but the authoritative copy needs to live somewhere.