I’ve been using the excellent CrashPlan software from Code42 pretty ever since I saw it demoed at MacWorld. CrashPlan allows you to do nearly effortless secure, offsite backup.
Each release of the software brings more control to the operation of the backup engine, but I wanted more control. I wanted to completely turn it off while I was at home so that it wouldn’t be using any of my precious bandwidth.
After a bit of investigation, I found that the java engine was controlled with SystemStarter. By issuing certain the following commands, I was able to start and stop the engine at will.
sudo SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”
sudo SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
Using this knowledge, I put together my final system crontab:
30 7 * * * root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 9 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”
0 18 * * 1,2,3,4,5 root SystemStarter stop “CrashPlanService”
30 23 * * * root SystemStarter start “CrashPlanService”