So, I am in the middle of ripping and encoding all my DVDs to h.264 files living in iTunes. 200 DVDs and some files which were lying around in various formats. This leads to around a Terabyte of additional data on my Mac mini.

Crashplan, my offsite backup solution of choice, did not cope too well with this¹. It kept displaying Unable to connect to backup destination for days on end. Turns out, it needed a bit more RAM to keep up with the new piles of data.

To get things going again, first stop the crashplan daemon:

1

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Next, take your favorite editor and point it with sudo to edit /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist. This XML-file is responsible for some parameters of the crashplan daemon. Look for the line:

1

<string>Xmx512m</string>

and change it to:

1

<string>Xmx1024m</string>

You just doubled the ammount of RAM Crashplan can use.

Save and close the file and restart the crashplan daemon with:

1

sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist

Crashplan should now manage to pump your data to your safe offsite backup destination.

(via: After Hours Projects)