Carbonite CPU Usage

jennifermckelvey wrote:

Hi, all!

I deleted Carbonite months ago after it screwed my computer up.

How did you delete it? Did you use the Carbonite Preferences pane?

Carbonite is one of those utilities that cannot be deleted just by dragging its icon to the Trash.

If that is what you did follow the instructions here: Manually Uninstalling Carbonite

Then I guess that junk software simply isn't written very well. Follow the manual procedure and read it carefully.

I believe all you need to do is delete the /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.carbonite.launchd.carbonitedaemon.plist file, but make sure you do everything else according to the instructions.

Note that it directs you to start and end with a reboot.

Yet the process remains active?

OK, then consider this list of potential hiding spots:

/Library

/Library/Application Support

/Library/Bundles

/Library/Caches

/Library/Extensions

/Library/Frameworks

/Library/Preferences

/System/Library/Extensions

/System/Library/LaunchAgents

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons

~/Library

~/Library/Application Support

~/Library/Caches

~/Library/LaunchAgents

~/Library/Preferences

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost

/usr/ (this one is hidden - you will have to use the Finder's Go > "Go to Folder..." to get there)

I may have forgotten other likely paths; in case anyone wants to offer some more places to look please do.

Pathnames that begin with / (slash) are at the root level of your hard disk. In other words, navigate to your iMac and select its hard disk icon (usually named Macintosh HD).

Pathnames that begin with ~ (tilde) are located in your Home folder.

Look for anything with carbonite in its name in each of these locations, if found, drag it to the Trash.

At the conclusion of each of these search-and-destroy missions, reboot your Mac and determine if the problem is solved. If not, repeat the search to determine if you overlooked something - or worse, if a running process recreated a file you are trying to delete.

Thanks. For future reference, in which of the above locations did you find it lurking?

Carbonite for Mac (Version 1.x) installs at the following locations:

/Library/Application Support/Carbonite [folder]

/Library/Contextual Menu Items/CarboniteCMM.bundle

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.carbonite.launchd.carbonitealerts.plist

/Library/LaunchAgents/com.carbonite.launchd.carbonitestatus.plist

/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.carbonite.launchd.carbonitedaemon.plist

/Library/PreferencePanes/Carbonite.prefPane

/Library/Preferences/com.carbonite.daemon.plist

[there is also a user-preference file in ~/Library/Preferences but it is not an active file. I would advise keeping this (very small in size) file b/c it contains account information that might be useful later (such as username for Carbonite account & backup serial number)]

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In order to delete (/uninstall) the Carbonite app, it's best to first disable it (see command below), then delete the individual files/folders that make up the app.

1.) Open Terminal App

2.) Type in the following:

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.carbonite.launchd.carbonitedaemon.plist

3.) It will then prompt for your Mac password. You won't see the icon move as you're typing in the password, but don't worry, if you typed it in wrong, just hit enter then try it again.

4.) Delete *all* the Carbonite app files in the list above

5.) Reboot the computer

(btw - the command in step two only disables the software until the next reboot/restart)

Yes, I too was experiencing very high CPU (130%!) whenever Carbonite ran on 10.85 and 10.9. Emailed them several times and sent screen shots of my activity monitor. I'll admit they asked for a good time to talk but I never got around to it. I saw so many other posts about this issue on these boards and elsewhere abd from years ago that I didn't bother with setting up time to talk as the precedent was set. I removed the files from areas in the 11/24/2013 post from clever.leigh.

Anyone know a good alternative to Carbonite?

But here's what I got today from Carbonite support:

"Thank you for your email. Carbonite should not be used to backup your applications. For both legal and technical reasons, it is not something that works well. When you backup applications, Carbonite tends to get stuck in a loop, causing the CPU to run much higher than normal. Please deselect your applications from your backup. You can do this by opening the Carbonite System Preferences and selecting the backup tab. Navigate to where your applications are and click on "Don't Back This Up" to remove it from your backup."

So I reinstalled and adjusted settings to not backup my applications.... bam CPU went back up to 134%.

Tried restart, got gray screen, lines, etc.

Restarting in Safe Mode and will reinstall as per above.

Lovely.

Using 10.9.2 and latest version of Carbonite. Their software on Mac OS X is problematic. I was using Carbonite on Windows 7 and no problems. With Mac OS X 10.9.2 it is terrible. I had to contact them twice to even get it to start backing up and then it started using 100% of my Intel i5 processor. The CPU was at 85 degree celsius due to the rogue process nature of Carbonite. I contacted billing to get a refund of what was left on subscription. No refund. Truly a poor implementation and I would look at BackBlaze or some other alternative. Either way you had better look a Carbon Copy Clone or Time Machine for system image since none of these online backup services handle your system files.

I just had an experience with Carbonite that may be instructive to all.

My Mac Mini Mid2011 2.5GHz Corei5 running 10.8.5 had been shut down for 24 hrs.

I had almost forgotten that I had Carbonite 2.5.0 running, having a cloud backup issue on another machine, I was reminded to look at it. It said it was Disconnected or Paused or something presumably doing nothing, but I saw activity monitor was showing Carbonite Daemon was using over 100% of CPU. I presumed Carbonite had not been running, was of no value, but nevertheless using a lot of CPU, so should be uninstalled.

I started finding instructions how to uninstall (above), but within a few minutes, I saw CPU go down to normal with Carbonite under 10%. And now it says "backed up" and "running normally" with two files less than 24 hrs old updated! It is obviously running perfectly and up to date!

I suggest that , at least at some times it indicates not running but is using high CPU, Carbonite is running hidden in the background updating its indexing, uploading or whatever, while peculiarly showing itself in one of these non-working modes: Disconnected, Disabled, etc.

So especially if it hasn't been running for a while, and it is using high CPU, let it run a while. While showing itself in one of the non-working modes, it may in fact be catching up on its searching, indexing, uploading, etc. Give it time to finish. It may be working fine.

I found instructions on how to completely uninstall all prefs and reinstall : (add trash the app from Applications folder to these instructions)

http://larrydaniele.com/Blogs/tabid/55/EntryId/51/How-to-Manually-Reinstall-Carb onite-to-Solve-High-CPU-Usage-Problem.aspx

I created a small shell script that runs in background and limits max CPU usage for annoying daemon processes. I have used CarboniteDaemon as the process name since its become a resource hog on OSX El Capitan running constantly at 100% but you can extend it to any process you are having problems with. The simple shell script uses another popular task called CPU Throttle (see link within README) and is loaded via standard cronjob entry.

https://github.com/skyhawk180/limitCPUMacProcessDaemon