Computer geek that I am, I thought this commercial was brilliant:

Adweek disagrees:

It’s almost a laugh-out-loud moment—this is what everyone was referring to?! Thank God it was only their files! And that’s the weird thing about this approach—it makes the viewer realize that photos and files and music and videos and the like, while sometimes of great sentimental value, really, in the end, is just stuff. It can’t compare to actually life, which is what the viewer is made to feel is threatened by the whole faux-horror tactic. The spot is nicely produced, but Carbonite is deflating its own importance here, which may not lead to too many new customers. Check out some print work after the jump.

I agree that it is jokey, but to me there is no “only [your] files.” I lose sleep over the possibility of losing my files, which are twice or thrice (for some files) quice backed up (depending on the file and its importance). I don’t use a service like Carbonite. Maybe, for the ones I feel the need to back up more than once, I should. One piece of subtlety I think AdWeek misses is that among the files lost would be those from the wedding itself. Or maybe I feel that way because our wedding photographer did everything digitally and provided no prints. But I suspect I am less than unusual among the sorts of people that would even consider using a service like Carbonite.

On a sidenote, the groom in the ad is Joe Egender, the same guy that played a sniper in the second episode of Alcatraz. When I saw him in Alcatraz, I swore he looked familiar. I hadn’t yet seen this Carbonite ad and going through his IMDB profile, nothing jumped out at me as familiar. I think that he simply reminds me of Kurt, one of my post-college roommates.