"How Do I Stop Adobe Background Processes from Launching at Startup on My Mac?"

Adobe's Creative Cloud app is like a virus, and a poorly programmed one at that. Though the app needs a number of background processes when it's running, they don't need to launch before then, and especially not when you start your Mac. But how do you stop them? And beyond that, how do you keep Adobe from restoring them?

Most of these processes -- all of which you can identify in the Mac's Activity Monitor by the Adobe logo -- are launched at startup by files known as launchagents and launchdaemons. There are three main locations where Adobe installs these:

Library/LaunchAgents/
Library/LaunchDaemons/
Users/[Your Username]/Library/LaunchAgents/

(If you don't know how to reach the hidden Library directory, pull down the Go menu in Finder while you're pressing the Option key.)

The names of the files that launch Adobe processes all start with "com.adobe", and NONE of these files are essential. Most of the advice you'll find on this topic simply tells you to trash them. That works well enough, but only until the next Creative Cloud update, when Adobe will reinstall them. But here's how to do away with them for good:

1. Copy the filename, making sure you include the "plist" extension.

2. Move the file to the trash, authorizing if necessary.

3. Create a new folder in the same directory.

4. Paste in the old filename as the new folder name.

Why does this work? The Mac Finder doesn't normally allow a file to overwrite a folder of the same name -- so the next time Adobe tries to install those files, it will fail. Still, you'll want to keep on eye on these three locations, for when Adobe installs a file with a new name.

With its launch files missing, Adobe will just have to wait till you launch the Creative Cloud app before it can run its processes. But keep in mind that, once you run the app, quitting it won't stop those processes too. You'll have to restart your Mac for that.

After taking care of launchagents and launchdaemons, there's one more process to stop. Go to the Extensions panel of System Preferences and click on Finder Extensions in the sidebar. Uncheck the box next to Core Sync Helper, and that's it -- though here too, you may have to repeat this action after installing a Creative Cloud update.

Update, June 26, 2019 -- OK, I found one reason you should leave Adobe's background processes intact. I encountered a bug in Photoshop's Save for Web, which wasn't saving its current settings under Mojave. After realizing it had compromised several hours of my work, and after failing to figure out a fix on my own, I went online to research it.

It turns out the bug was reported to Adobe eight months earlier, and it had taken them this long to fix it, but they'd done it -- in an update that was released about five days earlier. But because I had all the background processes shut down, I wasn't notified.

Something to weigh.

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