How to kill DropboxMacUpdate

Dropbox is a great tool. I’ve been using it for over a decade and it’s part of my core digital toolset but I use a Macbook Pro and the auto-update service, DropboxMacUpdate causes me much pain. So the DropboxMacUpdate killer or dmu-killer was born.

TLDR

Get DropboxMacUpdate killer from github

What is DropboxMacUpdate?

DropboxMacUpdate is an automatic update service that periodically self launches in the background. It connects to the Dropbox servers to check to see if there are any updates for the Dropbox application then automatically downloads and installs the necessary updates. It’s Dropbox developers’ way of keeping you bang up to date. Sounds like a great innovation doesn’t it? Not so for everyone, let me explain.

Why is it a pain?

Firstly, the DropboxMacUpdate service often determines that a multi-gigabyte download is necessary to keep me up to date. Now if my ISP was able to grant me an unlimited data quota that would be just fine but I live on a remote island, which is lovely but our internet access is very expensive, very slow and very limited on quotas. For instance at the time of writing I am paying £162 per month for about 30GB data per month.

Secondly, those downloads don’t always succeed so there have been times when multiple attempts have been made chewing up 10s of gigabytes of my monthly quota.

Thirdly and perhaps the main kicker, there is no means to stop or disable the service.

In addition to these issues there is also the school of thought that it’s not the best from a security perspective because this is tantamount to malware.

What did I try?

I took to constantly having the Activity Monitor app running so with the data usage showing on the icon in the dock and keeping a weather eye on it so that I can spot any sudden, unexpected hikes in data transfer activity. If I spotted the an increase in data transfer I Switched to the Activity Monitor to check if DropboxMacUpdate was the culprit and quitting it if so quit the process. Additionally to make sure it didn’t kick in while I nipped to the loo or went to make a brew I would switch off the WiFi and switch it back on again when returning to my desk. If I was working on something offline then I might just switch off the the WiFi.

However, due to the automatic nature of the service, even when quits, it’s only a matter of time before it reanimates and off we go again.

As you can imagine that’s a real pain to keep doing so I thought I’d be clever and I found the service in the file system and renamed it by prefixing an underscore to the service name. That sort of worked for a few hours but then those clever bods at Dropbox must have considered this move as well. To my surprise the main application re-spawned the service and popped a new version into the application folder right next to the one I renamed.

The solution

Not to be deterred I decided that what I needed was to basically to automate my manual process of checking to see if the process was running and if so kill it. If I could write a little script to do that and then add it as a Cron job to run every second then I’ll not lose another megabyte of quota to this invasive and expensive service.

After a bit of Googling around I came up with a few lines of bash script to do the job:

id=`pgrep DropboxMacUpdate`

if [ $id ]; then 
    kill $id
fi
exit 0

I saved that in a hidden folder on in my home directory and made sure it was executable:

$ chmod + x ~/.scripts/dmu-killer.sh

Then I created the following crontab entry to check every second:

*/1 * * * * cd ~/.scripts && ./dmu-killer.sh

Bingo, no more lost data – granted it does mean that my Dropbox installation isn’t going to be up to the second up to date but it puts me back in control of when I update the application. For example if I feel I want to update or need to update then I can disable the cron job and let DropboxMacUpdate run and then enable the cron job again.

Summary

• Dropbox is a great tool
• DropboxMacUpdate is not – it uses lots of bandwidth
• There is no preference setting or other means to disable it
• I made a script to run under a cron job to check and kill it

My dmu-killer script is available for you to download from GitHub