Friday, January 27, 2012

start and stop crashplan on a schedule

I love crashplan, but lately my computer is seeming really slow and maybe it's just me, but crashplan seems to be using more memory than I remember. I tried changing the settings to have it only backup at night, but that didn't lower the memory usage. So, instead, I decided to turn it off most of the time, and only turn on when I want it to backup a few nights a week.

It turned out to be fairly easy since the crashplan website has instructions on how to start and stop the service from the command line.

The start batch file is:
net start CrashPlanService
start "" "C:\Program Files\CrashPlan\CrashPlanTray.exe"
The stop batch file is:
net stop CrashPlanService
I already followed the instructions here to automatically mount network drives, so I put the batch files in the same folder. Then I made two tasks in task scheduler, one to start at night and one to stop in the morning. I saw some people online had problems getting task scheduler to work with batch files, so I made sure the folder and batch files had administrators and system set to full control. I tested it and it seems to work great!

Oh, and to save energy, I'm using the software smartpower to automatically hibernate and wake up my computer. I set it to wake up 2 nights a week for the crashplan backup.

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