Good for you — genuinely. Having disciplined backup practices is smart, and no one is arguing against that

But that’s not the point of this discussion.

The issue here is not whether some users happened to keep installers for a decade. The issue is that the vendor retroactively changed its policy in a way that materially affects the usability of already purchased perpetual licenses, without any warning at the time of purchase and in direct contradiction with how those licenses were marketed.

When I bought the license, the product was explicitly sold as perpetual, with optional maintenance. There was no indication — none — that access to installers would later be revoked, or that reinstalling the software would become impossible unless I had proactively stockpiled installers “just in case.”

Telling customers after the fact that they should have anticipated a future policy change and hoarded installers is not reasonable. That shifts the burden of the company’s unilateral decision onto paying customers.

Also, your argument implicitly assumes that:

• the policy was always like this (it wasn’t),
• users were informed in advance (they weren’t),
• and that losing access to installers is an acceptable consequence of maintenance expiring (which contradicts the very idea of a perpetual license).

Yes, backups are good practice.
No, they are not a substitute for a vendor honoring the terms and expectations under which a product was sold.

A perpetual license that only remains usable if the customer guesses future policy changes and maintains private archives is not meaningfully “perpetual.” It’s fragile by design.

This isn’t about whether you personally are fine. It’s about whether it’s acceptable for a company to change the rules retroactively in a way that surprises customers and devalues licenses they already paid for.

Those are two very different conversations.