It isn’t often that you hear about a stolen laptop being returned to its rightful owner — but still, that’s not really news. Toss in a police raid in Argentina and the recovery of about a $1 million in counterfeit U.S. bills — now you have a story.

It certainly isn’t a story that Gleb Budman, the co-founder of the automated backup service Backblaze, could have possibly imagined might some day be one of his company’s success stories. Not that they weren’t already doing just fine.

“We’ve already had a couple of people recover their stolen laptops,” Budman told Wired.com. “But I did not expect this to come out of it. This was lucky on all fronts.”

That’s putting it mildly. But the upside of the Law of Unintended Consequence is that this sort of thing is going to happen more often in our increasingly connected digital universe.

Backblaze, which costs $5 a month or $50 a year for unlimited backup of hard drives and external drives, works through software on a user’s computer that continually backs up data to Backblaze’s custom data center. Customers can use the service to recover deleted versions of files (say, for example, you edit a photo and then save it over the old one) or to restore data in the case of a hard-drive failure or theft.