CrashPlan Keeps Crashing

I had an issue where CrashPlan kept on crashing on Mac (OSX 10.8.4). The CrashPlan launch menu bar would also fail to show, and even when I started it manually, it would only stay active for no more than about 60 seconds before crashing again.

I thought the issue was related to my version of Java, but upgrading to the latest version did not solve the issue.

I finally came across a helpdesk article from Pro Backup, which uses the CrashPlan engine:

In some cases a large file selection (>1TiB or 1 million files) can cause CrashPlan to crash. This can be noticed by continuous stopping and starting. You may also see the CrashPlan application and System Tray icon disappearing in the middle of a backup. Or the main CrashPlan program will run for about 30 seconds then close down with no error message.

…

The CrashPlan engine by default is limited to 512MB of main memory. The CrashPlan engine won’t use more memory than that, even if the CrashPlan engine needs more working memory and the computer has memory available. When the CrashPlan engine is running out of memory it crashes.

The issue was that as a heavy user, I backup more than 1TB of data. However, CrashPlan only allocates 512MB of memory in Java, which is insufficient for my large backup size.

1. Stop the CrashPlan daemon:

   sudo launchctl unload /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

2. Edit /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist and change -Xmx512m to -Xmx1024m (or whatever is needed).
3. Restart the CrashPlan daemon:

   sudo launchctl load /library/launchdaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Problem solved!