Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Stopping and Starting CrashPlan Backup from the Command Line

… or, how to stopping Windows services using the command line.

I use Crashplan to automate my backups. Although it runs in the background, it nonetheless takes quite a bit of resources to run (at least for my little laptop that could).  Rather than keep pausing the backup for an x amount of hours repeatedly, I sometimes would rather just turn off backup completely for a while. To do this, I have two shortcuts on my quick launch bar to start and stop the Crashplan backup service.

The two shortcuts link to DOS batch files, which run a command-line command to start or stop the service (and therefore the backup). Here is the property dialog of the shortcut for stopping the service.

image

Also, make sure you click the “Advanced” button and enable the program to “run as administrator”:

image

In the batch file CrashPlan Stop.bat, I use the following commands:

net stop "CrashPlan Backup Service"
pause

In CrashPlan Start.bat, I use:

net start "CrashPlan Backup Service"
pause

Now, when I start testing programming code or running analysis, I just click the shortcut to stop the backup and prevent it from automatically starting itself.