How to pause crashplan on Mac OS X

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Crashplan on Windows has a taskbar icon that lets you put the backup daemon to sleep, but the Mac OS X port doesn’t seem to have this functionality.

You can’t just kill the backup daemon process. The OS X “launchd” superviser daemon will see the process go away, and immediately respawn the process. You have to tell launchd to stop the backup daemon by using the launchctl command:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

The crashplan daemon will start again after you reboot, or you manually restart it:

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

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  • Colorado Techie

    Thank you! This is a life saver! Now I just have to figure out how to make a clickable icon to fire off this command so my wife can easily pause crashplan.

  • http://matthew.mceachen.us matthew

    You can automatically pause crashplan when she’s using the computer by starting CrashPlan, clicking Settings, and under the General tab, enter zero for the “When user is present, use up to: 0 percent CPU” field.

  • CAA

    If that doesn’t work try this as a normal user in terminal:

    launchctl unload /Library/LaunchAgents/com.crashplan.engine.plist