Online backup client eats CPU!

Question

I have an online backup client from Mozy installed on my Mac Mini, and the actual backup process is scheduled to run daily at 23:00. The automatic backup is switched off. However, the backup client process is running at all times, and sometimes takes 50 - 60% of the CPU even when the scheduled daily backup is not being taken. This is not always momentary, and seems to continue for minutes, not just a few seconds. As you may imagine, this has a serious effect on the performance of the machine and is very frustrating.
An additional problem is that it seems impossible to stop the process from the Activity Monitor. It can be force quit, but restarts almost immediately. Repeating the force quit does not seem to help.
I have referred this to Mozy support several times, but they appear unable to resolve the issue. This is unfortunate, as the backup itself is useful, and works well. I am therefore wondering if there is anything that I can do within OS X to bring this process under control? I was thinking of possibly setting up a cron job to start and stop the backup client process?
Any thoughts and suggestions would be of interest and gratefully received!
Nigel

Answer 1

Thanks for that.
Unfortunately, it seems my thinking was not quite the best idea, as I have now received the following advice from Mozy Support:-
"I spoke with on of our senior support agents about the idea of quiting the Mozy client when not needed and he told me if you were to do that, Mozy wont know when files are changed and so wont back them up when you run a backup. Even when you aren't running a backup the Mozy client is watching all of the files on the machine and noting when a file needs to be backed up.
If you like, however, I can still provide you with the commands to effectively quit the Mozy backup daemon and launch it on demand. Alternatively, if the older Mozy client was better on resources and works for you, by all means use that version instead. To avoid having to re-select all of your files while changing the Mozy client version, when you select Uninstall from the MozyHome icon in the menubar, make sure the checkbox for Keep settings and log files is checked.
I know the Mozy Mac engineers are working towards reducing the resource footprint as much as possible, but Mozy is first committed to provide the most advanced and feature rich products. As such there will be a performance degradation as subsequent versions are released and ran on legacy hardware."
So switching the daemon off is clearly not a good idea; and the implication of the other comment is that Mozy don't care how much processor their system uses. Having researched elsewhere, it seems that this problem has been identified a couple of years ago, and Mozy don't seem to have made any serious effort to resolve it. From my perspective, I just want a reliable backup, the other bells and whistles are not interesting, and I would have thought that other users of a budget product would have similar requirements. However, Mozy seem content to leave us out in the cold. Fortunately, there are now other similar products, and a recent review in Macworld identified one called CrashPlan which seems to offer similar prices to Mozy (or slightly less).
For the time being I have reinstated an old version of Mozy that did not give this trouble, but will be looking seriously at CrashPlan, as reviews seem quite favourable.
Nigel