Multiple external drives + prevent sleep

[oberman]

Hi,

I'm a long time user, but with a new use case. Previously, I had a single external drive for backups (for quick bootable recovery) + a network based offsite backup (if the house burns down). But, I now have enough data that any restore will be painful, but a network based one is effectively impossible. So, my new strategy is two drives. I'll do nightly backups to the one at home, and once a week I'll swap it and take the other one to work.

My initial backups are running now, so I haven't had time to play with the interface. But, my concern is that the scheduled backups want a specific source & destination drive. Does that mean I'll have to schedule 2 nightly backups (one for each drive), knowing that one will always fail?

In addition, I have a new iMac. My old one had such problems with power management I gave up and let it run 24x7 (which worked out great for backups). The new machine seems ok with sleep/wake, so I want to leave power management on. Obviously, I'll have to schedule a wake up before the nightly backup. My question is: will SuperDuper prevent it from going to sleep? If not, I'll have to increase the default "wait before sleep" time to ensure a complete backup runs, which I don't want to do.

Thanks,
will

[dnanian]

If you write in to support, I'll provide you with some steps to alleviate the dual-drive hassle.

SuperDuper! will prevent your Mac from sleeping while it's running.

[rlesperance]

Hi Dave,

What does actually SD do to prevent sleeping ? I thought that like this utility called «Caffeine» the computer's idletime was reseted to 0, thus preventing the computer to go to sleep until the specified idletime is reached. I checked and SD does not seem to reset the idletime.

I am wrinting a script to prevent my computer of going to sleep when specific activities are running on all logged in user. I am curious to understand how SD does actually prevent the computer from going to sleep.

Could you explain how SD does that ? Thanks in advance.



Robert

[dnanian]

We respond to the power notifications the system sends and tell it that we're still active and working. That prevents 'voluntary' sleep but not 'forced' sleep.

[rlesperance]

Can I have access to the script that actually monitors this activity with the system ?

[dnanian]

It's not a script. It's Cocoa code.

[rlesperance]

Is there something in that code that I can use in AppleScript by invoking shell commands ? I am looking for a more efficient way to monitor the activity of defined process being at the «root» or «user» level ...

But I also have to say that I am not a professional scripter/programer ...

[dnanian]

Not really, no, sorry. There may be a way to do this kind of thing in AppleScript - I'm just not aware of what it might be.

[rlesperance]

I saw that you have files with very extensive and complex AppleScript. I picked up a few line of code to get SD's status.

The cocoa code you are talking about is not the same thing ?

[dnanian]

No, not at all. It's written in Objective-C.