Demonstrative screen capture of Adobe processes. I ran these manually just now, so resource usage is low.

How to Disable Adobe’s Creative Cloud Background Processes.

Yes, the ones you didn’t know were running this whole time.

If you’ve already scoured the internet for a response to this question, about now you’re probably expecting me to feed you a canned response from corporate and redirect you to pausing your file-sync in the app preferences.

I’m going to leave that to the professionals:

Corporate Response from Adobe.

If you’re at the beginning of your search, that may actually be what you’re looking for, and I encourage you to go turn off the start-on-login and file-sync features there.

I’m here to discuss preventing these processes and services from running continuously when you’ve already flipped all available switches in app preferences and aren’t even using Creative Cloud.

If you’ll be reading onward, I’ll presume you’re interested in the same.

The Problem

For me, it all started while I was troubleshooting some network issues. I checked traffic on port 53, running sudo tcpdump -i en0 port 53, and to my surprise, my computer was pinging p13n.adobe.io every second along with several other adobe endpoints at less frequent intervals.

Surprised, I checked for stray Adobe processes, running ps -ax | grep “Adobe", and I found 12 of them.

Now startled, I checked Activity Monitor to get a prettier view of what I then knew to be true.

Demonstrative screen capture of Adobe processes. I ran these manually just now, so resource usage is low.

The Solution

Library-based processes and services are expressed as plist files and should only ever by located among three folders: /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons, and your user-specific ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Adobe conveniently prefixes all their plist files with com.adobe. This gives us some room to programmatically find these suckers.

I tried forcefully ending the processes and disabling them, using launchctl unload -wF. This wouldn’t work at all unless I first manually stopped each one as well.

ls -d /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl stop
ls -d /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl stop
ls -d ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl stop
ls -d /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl unload -wF
ls -d /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl unload -wF
ls -d ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* | xargs launchctl unload -wF

Upon restart, I found I still had one Core Sync Helper process running. Also, with the insistence Adobe has displayed in running software despite knowing my preference to the contrary, I didn’t feel I could trust that Adobe wouldn’t go into the register and re-enable these processes at some future point (for my own good, of course). As such, I opted to simply move these files to a separate folder.

mkdir -p /Library/LaunchAgents_ignored
mkdir -p /Library/LaunchDaemons_ignored
mkdir -p ~/Library/LaunchAgents_ignored
mv /Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* /Library/LaunchAgents_ignored
mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.adobe* /Library/LaunchDaemons_ignored
mv ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.adobe* ~/Library/LaunchAgents_ignored

This, I realized, would also help house other deceptive background processes, should any of my other applications step out of line.

Even after this change and the corresponding restart, I was still stumped by this single extra Core Sync Helper process.

After some online digging, I made my way to the StackOverflow post of the hour. The issue was with a registered extension by Adobe to allow Creative Cloud to integrate with Finder. This, I disabled through System Preferences > Extensions > Core Sync > Finder Extension (uncheck).

Alas, I could sleep.

TLDR:

There are three steps.

1. Open Creative Cloud’s App Preferences and disable run on login and file sync.
2. Disable the Core Sync extension on your system: System Preferences > Extensions > Core Sync > Finder Extension (uncheck)
3. Stop the processes from running in the future. (2 options)

• Option A: Stop, unload, and disable all the processes with launchctl
• Option B: Move all the relevant plist files to backup folders.

Disclaimer:

I haven’t yet needed to use Creative Cloud again. When I do, I imagine I’ll need to undo some of these steps. I’ll circle back and post any novel steps here when that happens. It shouldn’t be more than moving the plists back, but all is rarely as it should be:

mv /Library/LaunchAgents_ignored/com.adobe* /Library/LaunchAgents
mv /Library/LaunchDaemons_ignored/com.adobe* /Library/LaunchDaemons
mv ~/Library/LaunchAgents_ignored/com.adobe* ~/Library/LaunchAgents

If anyone finds time to create a little package for this to make it more convenient for folks afraid of the terminal, let me know and I’ll link it here.

Please share in the comments what led you here on your search. Did your computer slow to a crawl with Core Sync hogging your CPU? Were the background processes eating up 50% of your RAM? Did you have a surprising network experience like me? I’d like to know!

Also, feel free to reach out with any questions.

#Unreviewed #Unedited

Cheers,
Justin