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Controlling a headless CrashPlan instance from Mac OS X @ 31 Mar 2013

I use CrashPlan as a computer backup solution. Rather than backing up to the cloud, I use a Raspberry Pi as a home CrashPlan server.

Fortunately, though technically unsupported, it's very easy to administer a headless CrashPlan instance (like that on a Pi): CrashPlan covers this in their support documents.

Steps 4-5 of "Configuring a Headless Client" require that the user temporarily modify the contents of CrashPlan/conf/ui.properties. While it is not difficult to locate that file on a Linux-like system (just look at the installation directory or list of files provided by the appropriate package), its location on OS X is not as obvious.

But all .app Mac applications are really just special directories. Assuming that CrashPlan has been installed to the system-wide Applications folder, this configuration file is located at /Applications/CrashPlan.app/Contents/Resources/Java/conf/ui.properties.

Given that pointer, CrashPlan's own instructions should do the trick.