Insomniacal Mac

I gave up on sleep/hibernate/etc. For similar reasons. Too much weird stuff.
I just shut down now. Booting from an SSD is plenty fast for me.

I realize this does not answer your question. Just stating my experience.

Alan Browne

2024-06-07 22:01:30 UTC

Post by AndrÃ© G. Isaak
When I put my Mac to sleep for the night, all the external hard drives
spin up for a few minutes around once an hour or so which is irritating
me. The screen does not wake up. I was wondering if anyone had any
suggestions for how to prevent this.
I'm running a 2020 Retina 5K iMac under macOS 12.6.7. In my Energy Saver
System Preferences, both 'enable power nap' and 'wake for network
access' are UNchecked. 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' is checked.

I wrote a program to (amongst other things) keep my external spinning
disks awake during the day and then late in the evening it stops that
until morning. Alas, something deep in the OS doesn't play fair.
The program should be (like the Mac) not logging anything through the night.

Recent log:
06-05::23:03:41 Stopped Keep Disk Awake Threads.
06-06::01:50 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::02:47 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::03:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::04:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::05:49 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::06:54 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 12288 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::07:21 Cur Mem: 12288 Max Mem: 12288 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::08:06:31 Started Keep Disk Awake Threads.

Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

--
British writing about the US can be condescending, but that there is
value in an outsiders’ perspective because they can “see the alarming
cracks in the wall the resident has stopped noticing… but also see the
grandeur of a room where the resident can only see the cracks.”
Jesse Armstrong.

Your Name

2024-06-08 01:37:35 UTC

Post by AndrÃ© G. Isaak
When I put my Mac to sleep for the night, all the external hard drives
spin up for a few minutes around once an hour or so which is irritating
me. The screen does not wake up. I was wondering if anyone had any
suggestions for how to prevent this.
I'm running a 2020 Retina 5K iMac under macOS 12.6.7. In my Energy
Saver System Preferences, both 'enable power nap' and 'wake for network
access' are UNchecked. 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' is checked.

I wrote a program to (amongst other things) keep my external spinning
disks awake during the day and then late in the evening it stops that
until morning. Alas, something deep in the OS doesn't play fair.
The program should be (like the Mac) not logging anything through the night.
06-05::23:03:41 Stopped Keep Disk Awake Threads.
06-06::01:50 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::02:47 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::03:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::04:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::05:49 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::06:54 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 12288 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::07:21 Cur Mem: 12288 Max Mem: 12288 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::08:06:31 Started Keep Disk Awake Threads.
Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

There are all sorts of things MacOS does behind-the-scenes during
"idle" times, Spotlight indexing, Time Machine, update checking,
malware checking, etc. being just a few examples. Sleep mode doesn't
stop all those things happening. Other apps running will also have
things the do.

The simple solution, as someone else said, is to just shut the computer
down when you're not using it - there's zero reason for it to be
running 24-7, unless it's an internet server that others need to access
while you're asleep.

Alan Browne

2024-06-08 21:29:08 UTC

Post by Alan Browne
Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

I'd just as soon it kept quiet all night.

The simple solution, as someone else said, is to just shut the computer
down when you're not using it - there's zero reason for it to be running
24-7, unless it's an internet server that others need to access while
you're asleep.

I leave it up for weeks - but of course it is asleep for good periods of
that.

Longest was on the order of 3 months before I was forced to re-boot for
some reason. This new Apple Si. Mac hasn't made it more than 4 weeks
w/o there being some good reason to re-boot it.

The old i7 iMac (2012) has been up since a power failure a couple months
ago w/o issue. But it's on lighter duty these days.

super70s

2024-06-11 02:33:46 UTC

Post by AndrÃ© G. Isaak
When I put my Mac to sleep for the night, all the external hard drives
spin up for a few minutes around once an hour or so which is irritating
me. The screen does not wake up. I was wondering if anyone had any
suggestions for how to prevent this.
I'm running a 2020 Retina 5K iMac under macOS 12.6.7. In my Energy
Saver System Preferences, both 'enable power nap' and 'wake for network
access' are UNchecked. 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' is checked.

I wrote a program to (amongst other things) keep my external spinning
disks awake during the day and then late in the evening it stops that
until morning. Alas, something deep in the OS doesn't play fair.
The program should be (like the Mac) not logging anything through the night.
06-05::23:03:41 Stopped Keep Disk Awake Threads.
06-06::01:50 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::02:47 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::03:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::04:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::05:49 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::06:54 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 12288 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::07:21 Cur Mem: 12288 Max Mem: 12288 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::08:06:31 Started Keep Disk Awake Threads.
Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

I would suspect Time Machine is the culprit. I don't use it myself -- I
just keep the system backed up on a Samsung flash drive because I don't
really need up-to-the-minute backup -- but I realize a lot of people do.

I normally just sleep the computer and never have a noise problem like
the OP described.

However, on my Ye Olde system on an old G3 MDD I did try sleeping it
all the time and I did notice noise like that, so I just went back to
keeping it turned off all the time.

Post by Your Name
The simple solution, as someone else said, is to just shut the computer
down when you're not using it - there's zero reason for it to be
running 24-7, unless it's an internet server that others need to access
while you're asleep.

Your Name

2024-06-11 04:48:08 UTC

Post by AndrÃ© G. Isaak
When I put my Mac to sleep for the night, all the external hard drives
spin up for a few minutes around once an hour or so which is irritating
me. The screen does not wake up. I was wondering if anyone had any
suggestions for how to prevent this.
I'm running a 2020 Retina 5K iMac under macOS 12.6.7. In my Energy
Saver System Preferences, both 'enable power nap' and 'wake for network
access' are UNchecked. 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' is checked.

I wrote a program to (amongst other things) keep my external spinning
disks awake during the day and then late in the evening it stops that
until morning. Alas, something deep in the OS doesn't play fair.
The program should be (like the Mac) not logging anything through the night.
06-05::23:03:41 Stopped Keep Disk Awake Threads.
06-06::01:50 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::02:47 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::03:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::04:52 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::05:49 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::06:54 Cur Mem: 11264 Max Mem: 12288 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::07:21 Cur Mem: 12288 Max Mem: 12288 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::08:06:31 Started Keep Disk Awake Threads.
Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

I would suspect Time Machine is the culprit. I don't use it myself -- I
just keep the system backed up on a Samsung flash drive because I don't
really need up-to-the-minute backup -- but I realize a lot of people do.
I normally just sleep the computer and never have a noise problem like
the OP described.
However, on my Ye Olde system on an old G3 MDD I did try sleeping it
all the time and I did notice noise like that, so I just went back to
keeping it turned off all the time.

I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems to
be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions of the
same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete the old
ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that silliness.

I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only
problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy.
If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour to
trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few altered /
new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it would hang
during that phase of working out what to copy and eventually stop with
an error, but updating to a slightly newer version seems to have fixed
that.

Alan Browne

2024-06-11 12:15:44 UTC

Post by Your Name
I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems to
be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions of the
same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete the old
ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that silliness.

Following the initial backup, succeeding backups are differences only
(changed files and new files), so it's a very slow accumulation. Once
the backup volume is near full, oldest redundant backups are removed.

Post by Your Name
I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only
problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy. If
I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour to
trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few altered /
new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it would hang
during that phase of working out what to copy and eventually stop with
an error, but updating to a slightly newer version seems to have fixed
that.

Time Machine does not have this issue. Note you can install s/w that
will run TM at a reduced pace (you turn off automatic TM updates and let
the scheduler s/w invoke TM) - this also addresses your issue above to
some degree.

--
"It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid
the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe."
Winston Churchill

Your Name

2024-06-11 20:40:44 UTC

Which, for those who want such a feature, partly defeats the purpose of
copying those old versions in the first place. When they want to
retrieve it, it could well be gone.

Post by Your Name
I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only
problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy.
If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour to
trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few altered /
new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it would hang
during that phase of working out what to copy and eventually stop with
an error, but updating to a slightly newer version seems to have fixed
that.

Time Machine does not have this issue. Note you can install s/w that
will run TM at a reduced pace (you turn off automatic TM updates and
let the scheduler s/w invoke TM) - this also addresses your issue above
to some degree.

For me Time Machine is a useless waste of time. That's why I turn if
off and chose to use CCC instead.

In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast, whereas CCC is frustratingly slow at doing what
should be the exact same task. I have no idea if that's due to changes
in the OS or CCC being badly programmed. When CCC started having
hanging issues, I did try another syncing app, but it didn't work at
all and just kept saying there were no files to copy.

Alan Browne

2024-06-11 21:50:11 UTC

Post by Your Name
I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems
to be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions
of the same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete
the old ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that
silliness.

Which, for those who want such a feature, partly defeats the purpose of
copying those old versions in the first place. When they want to
retrieve it, it could well be gone.

My older iMac TM volume is nowhere close to full after about 6 years.

It's not much of an issue. If there is a version of a file I really
need to freeze, I'll make sure it is standalone.

Post by Your Name
I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only
problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy.
If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour
to trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few
altered / new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it
would hang during that phase of working out what to copy and
eventually stop with an error, but updating to a slightly newer
version seems to have fixed that.

Time Machine does not have this issue. Note you can install s/w that
will run TM at a reduced pace (you turn off automatic TM updates and
let the scheduler s/w invoke TM) - this also addresses your issue
above to some degree.

For me Time Machine is a useless waste of time. That's why I turn if off
and chose to use CCC instead.

TM is my "live" backup.

I also maintain offline static backups of important stuff.

For my business the backup scheme is more elaborate and in depth - the
goal being that despite the worst possible disaster front and back
office can be up and running w/i 24 business hours (including the
acquisition of hardware).

--
"It would be a measureless disaster if Russian barbarism overlaid
the culture and independence of the ancient States of Europe."
Winston Churchill

Jolly Roger

2024-06-11 22:14:59 UTC

Post by Your Name
I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems
to be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions
of the same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete
the old ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that
silliness.

Following the initial backup, succeeding backups are differences only
(changed files and new files), so it's a very slow accumulation.
Once the backup volume is near full, oldest redundant backups are
removed.

Which, for those who want such a feature, partly defeats the purpose
of copying those old versions in the first place. When they want to
retrieve it, it could well be gone.

That's fully in control of the user. Following Apple's recommendation to
use a backup volume that is 2-3 times the size of the data being backed
up is all that is necessary to ensure this isn't a concern.

Post by Your Name
I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only
problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to
copy. If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly
an hour to trawl through the entire drive before copying just those
few altered / new files. There was also a problem at one stage where
it would hang during that phase of working out what to copy and
eventually stop with an error, but updating to a slightly newer
version seems to have fixed that.

Time Machine does not have this issue. Note you can install s/w that
will run TM at a reduced pace (you turn off automatic TM updates and
let the scheduler s/w invoke TM) - this also addresses your issue
above to some degree.

For me Time Machine is a useless waste of time.

You definitely don't speak for the rest of us.

--
E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my ravenous SPAM filter.
I often ignore posts from Google. Use a real news client instead.

JR

super70s

2024-06-12 02:17:26 UTC

Post by Your Name
In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast,

Was it ChronoSync by any chance? I still use that to back up my Tiger system.

I always used Maxtor external HDs (since acquired by Seagate) with my
old systems and they had this "One Touch" backup feature with provided
software, but I never used that. But all you had to do was touch a
button on the external to back everything up.

Your Name

2024-06-12 06:24:00 UTC

Post by Your Name
In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast,

Was it ChronoSync by any chance? I still use that to back up my Tiger system.
I always used Maxtor external HDs (since acquired by Seagate) with my
old systems and they had this "One Touch" backup feature with provided
software, but I never used that. But all you had to do was touch a
button on the external to back everything up.

It was either "ChronoSync" or more likely "Synchronize! Pro". I went
through a few apps testing them until I found one I was happy with.

I probably need to do that again so I can ditch the slow
CarbonCopyCloner (only use that when doing an initial full bootable
backup). I did try "SyncFolders Pro", various versions, but it is
utterly useless and never finds any new / altered files to copy.

super70s

2024-06-12 11:11:36 UTC

Post by Your Name
In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast,

Was it ChronoSync by any chance? I still use that to back up my Tiger system.
I always used Maxtor external HDs (since acquired by Seagate) with my
old systems and they had this "One Touch" backup feature with provided
software, but I never used that. But all you had to do was touch a
button on the external to back everything up.

It was either "ChronoSync" or more likely "Synchronize! Pro". I went
through a few apps testing them until I found one I was happy with.

Yeah I've heard of Synchronize Pro too. It must have been more
expensive than ChronoSync so I went with that.

Post by Your Name
I probably need to do that again so I can ditch the slow
CarbonCopyCloner (only use that when doing an initial full bootable
backup). I did try "SyncFolders Pro", various versions, but it is
utterly useless and never finds any new / altered files to copy.

CC Cloner has saved my bacon more than a few times with bootable
systems for new machines. They began introducing more "regularly
scheduled backup" features as time went on but I never used them.

Your Name

2024-06-12 21:33:16 UTC

Post by Your Name
In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast,

Was it ChronoSync by any chance? I still use that to back up my Tiger system.
I always used Maxtor external HDs (since acquired by Seagate) with my
old systems and they had this "One Touch" backup feature with provided
software, but I never used that. But all you had to do was touch a
button on the external to back everything up.

It was either "ChronoSync" or more likely "Synchronize! Pro". I went
through a few apps testing them until I found one I was happy with.

Yeah I've heard of Synchronize Pro too. It must have been more
expensive than ChronoSync so I went with that.

CC Cloner has saved my bacon more than a few times with bootable
systems for new machines. They began introducing more "regularly
scheduled backup" features as time went on but I never used them.

If CCC comparison routine actually worked properly (rather than
trawling through the entire drive every time), then scheduling a backup
when shutting my Mac down could be handy, but it takes an hour to find
and copy the few changed / altered files on the main drive (the
external drive is a lot quicker, despite being the smae capacity and
being fuller).

super70s

2024-06-13 01:01:12 UTC

Post by Your Name
In ye olde days of MacOS 9 and early MacOS X I used a great syncing app
that was very fast,

Was it ChronoSync by any chance? I still use that to back up my Tiger system.
I always used Maxtor external HDs (since acquired by Seagate) with my
old systems and they had this "One Touch" backup feature with provided
software, but I never used that. But all you had to do was touch a
button on the external to back everything up.

It was either "ChronoSync" or more likely "Synchronize! Pro". I went
through a few apps testing them until I found one I was happy with.

Yeah I've heard of Synchronize Pro too. It must have been more
expensive than ChronoSync so I went with that.

CC Cloner has saved my bacon more than a few times with bootable
systems for new machines. They began introducing more "regularly
scheduled backup" features as time went on but I never used them.

Yeah they should realize people don't want to be inconvenienced like
that do things a lot faster like the old ChronoSync and Synchronize Pro
programs. I've never had any problem with ChronoSync messing up when I
back up my Tiger system. It's really fast but I don't use it to back
the whole hard drive up, just selected folders that are important to
me. You turn each folder into its own ChronoSync file and then all you
do is click the file and confirm you want it backed up to the target.

Alan

2024-06-11 20:46:45 UTC