A couple of days ago, I discovered that my CrashPlan log (in /Library/Logs/CrashPlan/engine_output.log) had gotten huge—over 60GB. Googling, I found this article that describes how to increase CrashPlan’s memory. In cases where you have CrashPlan backing up millions of files, it can be necessary. After increasing the app’s memory, and deleting the log file, it has since remained at a more reasonable 1.5GB.
Here are the steps:
Launch a terminal window
Shutdown the crash plan daemon. You will be asked for your admin password. Go ahead and enter it here.
sudo launchctl unload /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
- Edit the plist file with BBEdit:
bbedit /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
Find Xmx512m and change it to Xmx1024m. This will allocate 1024mb of memory instead of the default 512mb
Save the file and quit BBEdit
Relaunch the Crashplan daemon (corrected Apr 19th 2012)
sudo launchctl load /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist
I had a 160Gb engine_output.log file and I’m only backing up about 250,000 files (though I have 3 targets, 2 local and one at Crashplan) I found it because I had run out of space and was looking for something large to move off my primary drive. Crashplan support was of the opinion that “that means somethings wrong with something.” Thanks yeah I figured that out.
Thanks for posting this! I was running out of free space on my hard drive, and no matter how much I deleted, the free space kept going down. I used Disk Inventory X to discover that I had a 126GB engine_output.log file! I just followed the instructions you linked to and increased the memory, and deleted the log file – hopefully that will fix the problem.