SD silently failing?

[axxxxe]

I have a scheduled daily 5:30am backup of the internal disk on my Macbook Pro (OSX 10.6.4) to an external Firewire LaCie Rugged.

Every morning when I get up I make sure a SD window is not displayed (I expect that if there is an error, SD will keep the window open after the failure). If I forget to plug in the LaCie before going to bed, for example, I find an error window in the morning.

Today I opened SD to show a friend and I see that the last backup was yesterday at 5:30, but the text appears in red. I opened the log and see what appear to be a successful backup from December 25. Looking at the target volume, it appears that no backup has run since December 25?!?

I just now launched "Copy Now" from the scheduler window at it appears to be working properly.

So what's been happening since December 25? Why did it not alert me to the daily failures?

:-/

[dnanian]

If there's a red entry, SuperDuper! would run and stay open with the scheduled copies window open so you can see it. However, if your Mac was asleep at 5:30am, the backup won't run at all, and thus... no notification of the failure...

[axxxxe]

My computer is set to never sleep, and I have a wake-up event for 5:27am just in case. I do require a password to unlock the screen from sleep and screen saver. Could that be causing the problem?

Is there some log I can look at from the missing backup dates (25 December - 13 January) to see what happened?

[dnanian]

You have to set it to wake one minute before the schedule, and if you have a password it will not work, since it won't wake fully without the password.

Try editing the schedule so that it runs a few minutes from 'now', then quit SD! and wait. Does it launch and run?

[axxxxe]

Yes, it launches and runs. It has run properly for the last two days at 5:30am, too. I have not changed the password requirement, either.

So it seems to be "fixed". I wish I knew why it didn't work for those 3 weeks... :-/