We addressed the technical issues that caused the above problems, and in the nearly two years since the incident, we have not encountered further problems. That said, our lawsuit seeks a refund for the defective products we were sold.

If that's true, I have to ask: Why file a lawsuit now? IT reporters and bloggers love to write about lawsuits, even more than they do about service outages. It's quite possible Carbonite has drawn more attention to a relatively small data loss two years ago than did the original incidents.

Since launching its online backup service in May 2006, Carbonite claims to have restored more than 160 million lost files for customers in at over 100 countries. The influential Web 2.0 blog dubbed Carbonite "the closest to perfection we've seen so far." Friend a year ago in a comment on ZDNet that the company had "several hundred thousand" users.