Stolen drives, $105 million lawsuits: Hollywood’s encryption problem

Encrypted drives are notorious for being unbearably slow. And in an industry where every second the camera is rolling, every minute of transfer time, and every hour rendering media has a dollar value attached to it, it’s no wonder encryption is not widely adopted as a default.

But that tradeoff comes with real risk, and two recent, very public incidents show exactly what’s at stake.

In June 2026, an unreleased World War II thriller called Fortitude, starring Nicolas Cage, was reportedly stolen from Netflix’s Los Angeles offices. According to the lawsuit filed by the film’s producer, the drive containing the movie was delivered to Netflix unencrypted, at Netflix’s own request, so the company could screen it internally. Ten days later, the drive was gone — swept up along with several others taken from employee desks.

It’s not an isolated case. Members of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour team had hard drives stolen from a rental vehicle in Atlanta, containing unreleased music, tour footage, and future setlists. The material still hasn’t been recovered.

Even though these are two very different types of productions and teams, the same underlying failure comes to the surface: high-value, high-stakes work saved and transported on unencrypted drives, because encryption was not treated as a must-have step.

The instinct to skip encryption rarely comes from carelessness. It comes from math. On a production timeline where drives are shuttling footage between set, editorial, VFX, and delivery around the clock, any tool that visibly slows people down gets worked around — encryption included. When security costs you speed, someone on a deadline will eventually decide it’s not worth it. That’s not a people problem. It’s a design problem.

Our founder and Co-President, Mike Shapiro, put it plainly in a conversation with Blocks and Files:

“Encryption, multi-level access controls, root-of-trust, and data protection have to be built into the devices without slowing people down. Security works best when it’s automatic, instead of another decision someone has to make during a busy workday.”

And this isn’t just a Hollywood problem. As Shapiro told Blocks and Files:

“The $105M incident involving a stolen drive containing an unreleased Nicolas Cage film has drawn attention to something that extends well beyond Hollywood. Companies across nearly every industry move valuable data on portable edge storage every day because that’s often the fastest and most practical way to keep work moving when teams are spread across locations and operating outside the traditional data center. When security depends on someone remembering to encrypt a drive, or secure a password, or lock up a physical asset, or following the right workflow every time, there will always be opportunities for something to go wrong or get stolen.”

That’s the design principle we’ve built iodyne around from day one: security that never asks anyone to choose between protecting the work and keeping the work moving.

This is where iodyne earns its keep: Every Pro Data and Pro Mini drive hardware is RAID-protected, XTS-AES-256 encrypted, with encryption keys stored in a Secure Enclave. Containers can be further protected with a unique, custom password or can inherit a device-specific password. However a team chooses to work, the safeguard is already built in. It is not a mode you switch on, not a checkbox you have to remember, not a setting a rushed intern skips during a busy workday. It’s simply how the device operates.

Pro Mini goes a step further for teams that want it, with Passkey-based access that unlocks containers with the tap of a phone.

Pro Data delivers up to 5GB/s TruePut, with multipathing that lets the RAID protection and encryption run in the background without ever touching the numbers editors and DITs actually feel on set.

Teams already running Pro Data in the field are seeing exactly that combination play out. When the Dallas Cowboys built an off-site production hub that had to satisfy both their own IT team and NFL security requirements without slowing anyone down, the usual tradeoff simply didn’t materialize: Pro Data’s always-on 256-bit AES encryption ran in the background without a performance hit.

Lola VFX, the visual effects studio behind de-aging and facial performance work on major franchise films, faced a similar bind: 14–18TB of raw footage a day, sensitive IP that couldn’t afford to leak, and offloads that used to eat four hours a night. Pro Data cut that to one or two. As Lola VFX’s Edson Williams put it: “It’s small. It’s sleek. It’s encrypted. As soon as we’re done shooting and I put the data on here, no one else is going to get to it.”

Taipei-based ABOOK Studio came to Pro Data from the opposite direction — after losing 30 years of irreplaceable footage to a hard drive failure, only half of it ever recovered. For director Joshua Lin, encryption and RAID protection weren’t a nice-to-have layered on top of speed; they were the entry requirement. “These experiences taught us that simply chasing large capacity or low prices is far from enough,” he said. Pro Data’s encryption and RAID-6 protection gave the studio, in Lin’s words, “incredible peace of mind” — alongside a 50% jump in post-production efficiency.

That combination — full-time encryption, full-time RAID redundancy, and sustained, production-grade speed, all at once — sounds like it should be a tradeoff. On paper, security and speed usually are. Getting all three at full strength, simultaneously, on hardware small enough to sit on a cart, and fit in a backpack, is the small miracle we spent years engineering into Pro Data.

If you’ve been defaulting to unprotected drives for your workflow, stories like these are worth a second look.

If Fortitude and Cowboy Carter teach us anything, it’s this: the projects worth stealing are exactly the ones worth protecting properly, by default, without anyone having to remember to do it.

We understand choosing the right storage to safeguard your most valuable assets can be complicated and overwhelming. That’s why we like to listen to you first, talk through your team’s needs, and see how we can make your life easier. Write us a few words to hop on a call.

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