Scheduled Backup Doesn't

[Wings]

I've been a satisfied user of SuperDuper for a while now. This is what I do with it:

At 3AM every day I have the Energy Saver System Prefs set to wake the machine. At 3:03AM every other day I have SD scheduled to make the backup to a Firewire drive. After the backup the computer puts itself to sleep after a period of inactivity, so when I sit down to work at around 6 or so, I wake it up and I'm good to go.

My screen saver is (and has been for a long time) Marine Aquarium. You know, the little fishies that swim around on your screen.

Ever since upgrading to the latest version of SD a couple of weeks ago my automatic backups no longer work. When I get to work in the morning what I see is a frozen screen of Marine Aquarium - everything is stopped. If I wiggle the mouse or hit a key the screen saver goes away and my desktop reappears. SD has failed to run. But a few times I have seen SD fire itself up after my desktop appeared and do its thing.

Anyone else having a similar problem, or have any suggestions? Also, where can I get a copy of the previous version? I want to try it so I can verify that this all started due to the new version.

(Quad G5, MacOS 10.4.9, 4.5GB)

[dnanian]

Please set the wake event for one minute before the scheduled backup time. That should, hopefully, resolve the problem.

[Wings]

Please set the wake event for one minute before the scheduled backup time. That should, hopefully, resolve the problem.

Okay, I'll do that, but I won't know until Wednesday if it works or not.

And as a matter of curiosity could you tell me how being awake for 1 minute or 3 minutes has any bearing on SuperDuper's ability to automatically run?

[dnanian]

You bet. When the system wakes, and OSX doesn't detect a "user" at the keyboard (no input, no mouse, no nothing), it tends to go to sleep much faster than it would normally. You want to cut the delay from wake to backup as close as possible to prevent the sleep from occurring.

[Wings]

I set the wake up time to 3:02 and left SD to auto-run at 3:03. Still no go. It was waiting for me this morning with the screen saver hung up like always. I taped a key and within a few seconds it started running (it's running right now). I thought the next time it was to run was Wednesday but I was off by a day.

I guess this may not be a SuperDuper issue if I seem to be the only one with a question about this. I guess I'll keep looking for something else that is interfering with SD's scheduling. But I know that it's scheduling is at least firing up on the correct day since this only happens on SD's scheduled backup days. Maybe I'll have to run it with iCal and a script.

Thanks for your help dnanian. And dnanian, Macs go to sleep after the period of inactivity set in Energy Saver, regardless if a human is there to provide some initial activity or not. The only time difference in time before sleep would be your perception of it, unless you observed this with a very short sleep time of a minute or so. At short times like that, the actual delay seems almost random in that it sometimes adds 1 or more minutes to the delay (like some background activity is keeping it alive).

[dnanian]

I don't know why that might be, Wings. But regarding Energy Saver, while this might be the case in the situations you've personally experienced, I respectfully suggest that you're not correct for all. I've dealt with many, many thousands of systems where this behaves exactly as I've said: I wouldn't suggest it if it wasn't a real issue.