Ryan Leslie Offers $1 Million Reward For Stolen Laptop: Simple Backup & Encryption Solutions

You may or may not have heard about producer Ryan Leslie’s most recent controversy involving a stolen laptop and personal belongings along with a considerable sum of cash. The details of the incident aren’t important, but immediately after the theft Ryan offered a $20,000 reward for safe the return of the laptop.  Today the reward was raised to $1,000,000 USD.

Ordinarily Crate Kings would not mention the incident and I truly hope that he’s able to reacquire his personal physical and digital property, however, there are great lessons that others can learn to hopefully avoid such a disastrous situation.  To put it simply… Backup and Encryption are a must.

1. Data Backup?
Hard drives fail and data losses occur. The last thing you want is to lose years and potentially hundreds or thousands of hours of work just because you didn’t feel like investing a tiny amount of time to backup your valuable files.

Online Backup Solutions – If you don’t mind storing your files offsite, then products such as Mozy offer the ability to backup your files through the net. They even offer up to 2 GB of free storage for personal users.  A personal favorite of mine that I use everyday is Dropbox, which offers the ability to backup and sync folders across multiple computers and devices. Like Mozy, Dropbox offers users 2 GB of free storage.

On-site Backup Solutions – When  I was hardcore Windows user Acronis True Image effectively performed its duties with minimal configuration. It’s not free, but the reasonable price tag was great insurance against catastrophic data loss.  Apple incorporates Time Machine straight out of the box in Mac OS X. Use it. This alone has saved me when I’ve accidentally deleted something that I shouldn’t have.  Another great Mac solution is Superduper, which creates a fully bootable backup of your hard drive and can come in handy during an emergency.

2. Data Encryption:
Backup is great when your hard drive crashes, but if you don’t want others to be able to view your files, then you’ll need file encryption. And no, having a login password will not prevent anyone from logging into your computer. Login passwords can usually be bypassed with relative ease, this is especially true with Macs.

TrueCrypt works on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Best of all it’s free. In fact, TrueCrypt has been so successful in doing its job that the FBI was recently unable to crack its encrypting of a Brazilian banker’s hard drive  Knox is another quality Mac based encryption solution, which is made by the makers of 1Password, another highly recommended solution that I personally use.

This is by no means an exhaustive list or coverage, but it should be enough to keep most people covered and protected throughout the worst of times.  Please feel free to leave a comment naming your favorite backup and encryption solutions.

43 thoughts on “Ryan Leslie Offers $1 Million Reward For Stolen Laptop: Simple Backup & Encryption Solutions”

  1. I’m probably just jaded and a hater, but I don’t really feel that sorry for him, especially after the little hissy fit. Plus, you walking around with 10G’s spending cash, man. I’ve never had 1G like that. I don’t want anyone to loose their stuff like he did, but the world goes around, and these things happen to every single person.

  2. freakin idiot man. why leave a expensive labtop with ALL ur data in a expensive car when ur a fuckin celebrity? smh

    • Careless? Someone broke in and stole his shit.

      I mean yeah, he “should’ve have kept it somewhere else” but still, someone stole his shit and thats fucked up on many levels.

          • lol Who the hell wouldnt be crying? I’ve had my laptop stolen before and I bought another one 4 months later. I didnt have a million dollars to offer anyone. Point is, he shouldve at least backed up his material knowing how vulnerable he is to get GOT due to his celeb status and leaving his laptop (with a shit load of IMPORTANT material) in a ride is being careless in my opinion.
            Live and you learn.

  3. Man IK wish i knew who it was. I would have the money wired to a bank aaccount and be on my way to Brazil. LOLLOL

  4. ^ sorry about the typo’s. I was getting excited abiut moving to brazil my hands were shaking, then i remembered i don’t have any money or his laptop. 🙂

  5. ^^^ LOL

    No need to get third party for encryption on Mac (same is probably true on Windows too). Just turn on File Vault. You’ll be taking a speed hit on writes / reads, so if disk access time is an issue (DAW, video editing) one might want to consider that.

    Yeah, and no idea who this guy is.

  6. 1 mill! man im guessing there was a whole life of hard work and music production on that mac,but 1 mill? you gotta feel for the dude,but if you got that amount of cash with all that hard work on one mac without a back up?
    if that was me,and that mac meant 1 mill to me i would have that bag by my side 24/7 like under my pillow steez,plus i wouldn’t roll up in a flashy car cause im low maintance like that,straight second hand beetle with rust on the sides,this is good promotion though,never heard of this cat before

  7. STUPID BUFFOON. NEVER HEARD OF THIS GUY AND FROM THE CLIP HE LOOKS LIKE HE LOVE HIMSELF FAR TOO MUCH.
    OBVISOUSLY THE ORIGINAL 20K HE OFFERED WASN’T ENOUGH COMPARED TO THE MEDIA PAYING MILLIONS TO GET HOLD OF HIS VIDEOS OF HIMSELF, TWO MIDGETS AND A BOTTLE OF KY.

  8. Just keep in mind that running large multitrack sessions off of an encrypted partition or file container will most likely *annihilate* your CPU performance.

    It’s an effective strategy for storage but, man, if you’re actually doing real work on the partition any heavy disk-IO will be painful.

    I also highly recommend Jungle Disk Backup for off-site backups of client data. It backs up encrypted to Amazon S3. Juicy.

  9. So I have my laptop stolen with invaluable stuff on. I know what I’ll do. I’ll write a little tune about it, put it on youtube with a slickly produced video advertising the rest of the tour dates, offer a million dollar reward (because I know it can’t be claimed) and get everyone talking about it! Looks very fishy to me.

    • yell i guess i never thought of it that way. now i don’t doubt that it got cliped, but for real why make a video about it. plus the jump from 20g’s to 1 million. that is a hella jump! i could even see maybe 50g’s or 100g’s, but 1 million!? there must be somthing on there. or else it’s a stunt to the highest order.

  10. To each his own, but where I come from you never leave ANYTHING in your car – not your cds, skateboard, cell phone, tens of thousands of dollars and a laptop with irreplaceable work on it, you know, everyday shit you have in the ride

    -smells like a publicity stunt imo

  11. Know we know about this dude great scam he can up the reward to 10 mill cause there is nothing to find. Why would crate kings put this lil Wayne sounding garbage type music on here anyways?

  12. i’m surprised some of you guys dont know about ryan leslie? even tho he’s a mainstream producer he’s a genius. check up on his background, he graduated from harvard at like 19, talk shit about him all you want most people are clearly not fuckin’ with him.

    a mill for a laptop? hmm probably a stunt or some REALLY personal shit on there haha

  13. I’m thinkin’ this dude has money from making some extremely prudent (or perhaps lucky) investments in years past and he is able to pursue music at this level because of that…he most certainly doesn’t have that kind of cash from his own work (I don’t even think he’s cracked 100k combined for his two solo albums) and I can’t imagine he gets more than 30k per track he produces/writes but maybe I’m just too naive.

  14. Seriously??? C’mon son! SMH at all of you who don’t know who Ryan Leslie is. Y’all must really be stuck in ’94 or something.

    He’s arguably one of the most talented singer/songwriter/producers in R&B to come out in the last 5 years. Check out his in-studio videos. Yes indeed, sometimes he seems like a tool, but you can’t deny his musical talent.

    If you’ve ever been on tour, especially in Europe, you’ll understand why he was walking around with 10G’s in his pocket. Often times, you get paid cash for your incidentals (i.e. per diem), or even do walk-thru’s at after-parties, so it’s no surprise that he was walking around holding that.

    I highly doubt that he was rolling around with his entire life’s worth of music on the Hard Drive (he graduated from Harvard at 19, for christ sakes lol). Keep in mind, this dude produces for platinum artists like Beyonce, Chris Brown, etc, so even if he had 2 sessions on the entire drive, it could be worth a milli to him (as well as the artists he’s working with). As far as the reward money, he’s made so much money off his producing/songwriting/publishing that I’m sure dude isn’t sweating a million dollars.

    Just saying…

  15. @ G Breezy we don’t give a shit this is crate kings key word CRATE he doesn’t make crate hip hop so this story would be perfect on that r&b/pop/radio hip hop site. 90s best era we stay stuck there it was better there.

  16. i bet he had something really personal stuff…. Child porn , sister lover or something… oh no maybe he peed on some one like R kelly ~

  17. Its a shame some of yall cats are on Crate Kings primarily because yall love music, but yall don’t know who Ryan Leslie is. A major part of crate diggin is PAYING ATTENTION TO CREDITS, and he some some respectable ones. Even if he doesn’t create Crate music, he’s incredibly talented, and an actual MUSICIAN. If you call yourself a beat maker/producer/musician/music lover….try peeping out some of his in studio joints on youtube and still not give him props. I’m just saying.
    While this could possibly be a lil scamish, i’m sure he’s got some beats/pro tools sessions/whatever on the laptop thats well over 1 million dollars. I’d love the chance just to be able to study some of his sessions and such, do yall know how valuable some of production practices are worth? But all also admit that he should known better than to get caught slippin like that tho.

  18. Here is a big tip for anyone with a laptop: DON´T keep sessions or anything confidential or private on your laptop, especially if you travel with it. Keep it on a usb key chain, and on you at all times. If you, for whatever reason, don´t want anyone to be able to easily read it – encrypt it. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of problems.

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