(See also my screed about CrashPlan’s handling of shutting down their home backup service, and my documentation of what I’ve replaced CrashPlan with.)
September 4, 2017
Capital One
P.O. Box 30285
Salt Lake City, UT 84130-0285
To whom it may concern:
I am writing to dispute a charge for $59.99 on from Code 42 Software Inc dated July 11, 2017 on my Visa Signature card ending in [elided].
Code 42 Software provides online computer backup services. In particular, I have subscribed to their service called “CrashPlan for Home” for five years. The $59.99 charge on July 11 was my annual renewal of the service.
A month and a half after I renewed the CrashPlan for Home service, CrashPlan announced that they were terminating the service, effective when their customers’ current subscriptions expired.
CrashPlan for Home serves three distinct yet related purposes:
- It backs up the current files on your computer, so that if your computer crashes you can recover everything.
- It retains copies of backed-up files that you have deleted from your computer, so that if you realize after-the-fact that you shouldn’t have deleted something, you can recover it from CrashPlan.
- It preserves old versions of files that you have modified on your computer, so that if you realize at any point in the future that you need an older version of a file, you can recover it from CrashPlan.
All three of these services are valuable and important, and all three of them are why I chose to subscribe to CrashPlan for Home for five years and to renew my subscription on July 11.
Now that Code 42 has announced that they are terminating their CrashPlan for Home service, I could, should I choose, continue to use it up until my membership expired, i.e., for almost another year. But here’s the problem: although the service remains useful for the first two purposes enumerated above, now that they have announced that they are terminating the service, it is useless for the third purpose.
It does not do me any good for CrashPlan to preserve old versions of my files if a year from now those preserved versions are going to disappear – when the service shuts down – and I will no longer have access to them. In fact, now that Code 42 has announced that they are terminating the service, every day I continue to use it puts me at greater risk of losing an old file version that I end up needing.
I have explained this to Code 42 and asked them to provide a mechanism for their users to export the old, preserved file versions from their backups before the service terminates. In reply, they have informed me that they have no plan or intention of doing so.
I therefore asked Code 42 to refund my subscription renewal and cancel my subscription immediately, because they are no longer providing for me all of the services which they promised when I renewed my subscription. They have declined to issue me a refund.
Please note: because I am not willing to incur the risk of losing access to old file versions that I end up needing, I have already switched, at additional expense, from CrashPlan to a different backup service and stopped using CrashPlan. I did that within days of being notified that the service was being shut down. I have no intention of using CrashPlan again at any time between now and when the service is terminated.
In short, Code 42 changed the terms and conditions of the service I paid for after I paid for it, and they are now refusing to issue me a refund even though the product they sold me essentially no longer exists.
Please help me resolve this issue to my satisfaction.
Thank you,
Jonathan Kamens
