CrashPlan engine notes

The good folks at Code42 have made some changes to the way that CrashPlan is loaded and controlled at the system level.  After a bit of digging, I’ve got it figured out. 

They are now using launchd to control the engine.  So at boot, the following is executed by kernel_task (with root perms):

launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

This means that launchd is constantly monitoring the process to make sure that it is running.  Should make the software even more reliable.

To unload the software as a mere mortal, I issued:

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

The -w flag adds the “disabled” key from to plist to keep launchd from immediately relaunching the process.

All loaded processes can be listed per user and sudo can be adding to list the system-level processes.

launchctl list

My final crontab:

30 7 * * * root launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
30 23 * * * root launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist