error messages?
 

Hello,

I've just recently started using SD for backup, the first time I've ever backed up anything in the nine years since our old Bondi Blue iMac. Going through a hard drive failure on our Flat Panel 800 MHz iMac prompted me to get an external Western Digital hard drive and start backing up. Anyway, for two days now, SD did not back up the Macintosh HD to the Sparse Image on the external drive; under Scheduled Copies, it still lists "Last Copy" as Monday morning. Next Copy has listed the next morning, as usual. There have been no Error Messages, or any notification of failure, but, maybe I don't know where they would be? No dialogue box has come up. The Log shows data only for May 19.

I've been reading the Help, and hope to devote some time soon to reading the User's Guide. Should I perhaps delete the Scheduled Copy that I have set up, and make a new one? Sometimes I miss the good old days of trashing preferences; there is so little trouble since OS X that I don't know how to troubleshoot things anymore! Thanks,

jay

P. S.
 

Ok, I just clicked on "Show Log" in the Scheduled Copies pane, and, there I do find the complete log for the copy that occured Monday morning. Nothing for Tues. or Wed.

Is your Mac asleep, perhaps, when the time to run comes, or are you logged out?

Try editing the entry in the Scheduled Copies window and setting the time for "a few minutes from now". Then, quit SD! and see if it runs while you're watching...

Thanks! The first day I had it set up, it did not copy either. Thinking it might be sleep/wake issues, I set the Preferences for the computer to Never Sleep, and checked the box to allow "put the hard disks to sleep when possible". I was under the impression that this would allow the HD to spin down, but the computer would not actually be asleep. The guy at Western Digital support had told me he thought the MyBook would not be noticed by the iMac if it were let to sleep. Anyway, that worked, and it copied every morning for a while. We actually never log out. When it first failed to copy the other day, I changed the Preferences, so that the HD would sleep after one hour, and set a schedule for it to wake up at 1:25 AM, in time for the scheduled Copy at 1:30 AM. That made no difference.

Thanks for the suggestion, which I will try now. I'll have to leave it if it runs or not and get back to work; I'll let you know later what happens.

jay

You'd actually need to set the wake time for one minute before the scheduled copy time...

OK, editing the Scheduled Copy for a few minutes later did set SD to Copying and it successfully copied, listed it as Last Copy, and showed it in the Log. I reset the time to 1:30 AM and will see what happens tomorrow. I will change the wake up time to one minute prior, as you say, but, why? If the iMac wakes up at, say, 1:15, and display sleep won't happen for 30 minutes, and Computer sleep won't happen for an hour (or three hours, as I've got it set now), why would SD not be OK to run? Why the "one minute" after wake up time? Anyway, thanks for your help!

jay

Because when a Mac wakes and there's no "human" at the keyboard, it tends to go right back to sleep...

Thanks for everything! The Scheduled Copy worked this morning no problems. I left the iMac scheduled to wake up at 1:15 AM and the Scheduled Copy for 1:30; it worked OK but I guess I'll set the wake up time closer anyway, just in case. After I thoroughly read the User's Guide, I think I'll then have to decide if I want to continue with the Sparse Image (which lets me keep other data on the external drive without partitioning) or, partitioning and setting up an actual bootable clone, which would be good to learn how to use, and/or learning how to set up and use Sandbox, or, some combination of the above. Anyway, SuperDuper is, well, super duper.

jay

Glad things are working better, Jay.