It would be good if -- in addition to emailing customers BEFORE you archive their backups -- you specify in the email what counts as 'connected'. I already responded to this HN post by digging an ancient machine out of the closet and booting it, so that it can connect to CrashPlan, make a null backup, and thus rescue my old backups of it from impending deletion. If merely performing a single-file restore (or merely checking some box on the website) was enough to indicate that the backup is still 'live', that would be nice to know.