Flaky execution of scheduled backups? No Sat. AM in "Daily"?

[drlotto]

There were 4 indicators that the Mini was awake:
1. the activity light
2. the sleep monitor stating its awake and cannot sleep
3. the internal HD spinning before I clicked the mouse
4. me looking at the desktop as the monitor started and then SD started

I guess I'm on my own to figure this out. I'll to try hooking up a non-BT mouse+keyboard to see if there is a relation there (googled this suggestion from another site). If I find a solution I'll pass it on.

I usually just go on and forget about asking for support but I think it may help to express my disappointment this time. I'm not disappointed with SD but with the last support and the email support responses from ShirtPocket. Both modes of support led to the same quick "solution" that the issue had to be the Mac because SD works so well. Good luck and thanks for playing.

I agree that the root cause of this issue could boil down to hardware or my specific configuration, but that doesn't mean that SP support could attempt to investigate. Maybe a future version could incorporate a fix or work-around for flawed hardware.

Obviously, I'm in the underwhelming minority to actually have a problem with SD, but I'm at least the 2nd person with this specific issue (I'm not sure if DrDan ever solved the problem). I write this only because this is where SP could distinguish itself from the self-serve support offered by other corps.

DrLotto

[dnanian]

I understand, and I do the best I can to help. I've done what we documented myself, on many different machines, without this kind of problem. I've attempted to duplicate your issue, and I've been unable to. (Two of the systems I tested had BT mice/keyboards, two had wired, one had non-Apple [MS].)

If I can't reproduce the issue, and it's not happening to a lot of people, it's really difficult for me to provide support above and beyond what I've done. It's not that I don't want to help: it's just that we're simply scheduling a program to run with a system facility: cron. If cron then fails to run us -- or the system doesn't allow us to run after wake in your configuration -- there's nothing we can "tweak" to convince it to do so other than the time between wake and run.

Apart from clean installing to another drive/partition and trying it in a pristine configuration -- something I'm sure you'd not want to do -- the only thing I can suggest is creating a new, fresh account, logging out of your regular one and into that, and scheduling as that user (you'll have to re-enter your registration info). Perhaps something you're running is interfering.

[DrDan in MA]

Hi -- I haven't been around in awhile, sorry for having missed out on DrLotto's traffic and problem. Perhaps this fix will work for you too, DrLotto...?

Reason I haven't been around is that SD has been working regularly as daily clockwork on both an Al-PBg4 and PowerPC Mini. I am not using either CronIX or NMS Sleep Assist on either.

All I've done is to modify Energy Saver to UNcheck the option that says "Put the HD to sleep when possible." Thus, the HD's are never turned off (I always run my systems on external power when I'm at home, so no worries about power, only extra wear-'n'-tear on HD's, but whatthehell) and so whenever a wakeup event happens (both systems wake at 3:29AM daily), the HD's are ready to run and when SD!'s schedule 0330 run is involked, it can start up and do its thing. Whenever I check into SD!'s status I invariably find that its last run was completed at about 0340 each day. Been like that for weex.

I've been saying to myself for awhile that I really should come back here and thank you for all your support and close this issue (at least from my own perspective).

I wonder: would it be prudent to, every so often, do another run -- say at 00:00 as I go to bed -- that would do a total erase and re-write of the backup area, so that at 03:30, it would again resume the daily smart backups? I would have to hand-start the complete backup because I wouldn't be able to schedule more than one daily wakeup...

Any ideas on what interval would be good for a complete re-write? Monthly? Or is this not needed, d'you think?

Looking fwd ti the next rev that'll fix the minor day-of-update-display bug (Saturday AM not shown, discussed elsewhere) and whatever other nifty NEW features now in your pipeline.

Great product still!!! Thanks.