I agree that the should have given more notice, and I agree that if this was a change of policy it should have been stated as such.

But let me play devil's advocate for a moment. Andy, I probably wouldn't call what you're doing a backup. Sure, they might be old backups, but at this point I'd call that storage. You're storing those files on Crashplan's service, and that's not the service they sold you. They aren't Dropbox or Onedrive, they're a backup system. It's intended for the active backup of in-use computers. I'd imagine they have quite a few computers in the same situation as yours, and they're paying quite a bit to Amazon (I'm pretty sure they use Amazon) to store those files.

I have a couple computers in this position, but fortunately they're not computers I care about, so I can't claim that I'm really in the same boat as you. But I still don't find too much wrong with what they're doing. I think they could have handled it better, though.