Jan 31

Written by:
1/31/2011 5:23 PM 

I spent a few hours on the phone with Carbonite tech support to find out why my CPU usage is constantly hovering around 80% (attributed primarily to process name "CarboniteDaemon") and why the Carbonite backup program itself never reached an idle state.

We tried installing the latest version for the Mac (currently 1.1.4) but that didn't help. There is a Carbonite log file at "/Library/Application Support/Carbonite/Data/Carbonite.log" but that didn't reveal the problem. Then we tried the following command:

sudo fs_usage | grep "CarboniteDae" >/CarboniteOutput.txt

Note: Since fs_usage will keep generating output, you'll need to press Ctrl+C to stop logging to the file after a minute (or less).

Opening the resulting CarboniteOutput.txt file in the root folder show that lots of apps were being checked for backup. The high CPU usage problem stems from trying to backup running applications. The solution is to go to the Carbonite pane in System Preferences, select Backup and make sure that any folder that might contain a running app (e.g. "Applications", "devtools", etc.) is set to "Will not be backed up" (indicated with a red dot) next to the folder or file.