Re: Insomniacal Mac

On 2024-06-10 21:48, Your Name wrote:

On 2024-06-11 02:33:46 +0000, super70s said:

On 2024-06-08 01:37:35 +0000, Your Name said:
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On 2024-06-07 22:01:30 +0000, Alan Browne said:
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On 2024-06-06 20:35, André G. Isaak wrote:

When I put my Mac to sleep for the night, all the external hard drives spin up for a few minutes around once an hour or so which is irritating me. The screen does not wake up. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for how to prevent this.
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I'm running a 2020 Retina 5K iMac under macOS 12.6.7. In my Energy Saver System Preferences, both 'enable power nap' and 'wake for network access' are UNchecked. 'put hard disks to sleep when possible' is checked.

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I wrote a program to (amongst other things) keep my external spinning disks awake during the day and then late in the evening it stops that until morning.  Alas, something deep in the OS doesn't play fair.
The program should be (like the Mac) not logging anything through the night.
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Recent log:
06-05::23:03:41 Stopped Keep Disk Awake Threads.
06-06::01:50  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 11264 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::02:47  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::03:52  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::04:52  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::05:49  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 11264 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::06:54  Cur Mem:   11264 Max Mem: 12288 0.000 MBi/hr
06-06::07:21  Cur Mem:   12288 Max Mem: 12288 1.000 MBi/hr
06-06::08:06:31 Started Keep Disk Awake Threads.
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Sometimes it will go the whole night w/o waking more than once or twice.
(In the "daytime" that log hits 1/hour on the hour as designed).

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There are all sorts of things MacOS does behind-the-scenes during "idle" times, Spotlight indexing, Time Machine, update checking, malware checking, etc. being just a few examples. Sleep mode doesn't stop all those things happening. Other apps running will also have things the do.

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I would suspect Time Machine is the culprit. I don't use it myself -- I just keep the system backed up on a Samsung flash drive because I don't really need up-to-the-minute backup -- but I realize a lot of people do.
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I normally just sleep the computer and never have a noise problem like the OP described.
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However, on my Ye Olde system on an old G3 MDD I did try sleeping it all the time and I did notice noise like that, so I just went back to keeping it turned off all the time.

 I've never bothered with Time Machine either. It's methodology seems to be a ridiculous waste of drive space backing up mutiple versions of the same document. I don't use Versions either and always delete the old ones if using an app like Pages that insists on doing that silliness.

Drive space is cheap. Yes: Time Machine backs up multiple versions of a document, but it also prunes those versions:
Hourly backups for the past 24 hours.
Daily backups for the past month.
Weekly backups going back as far as disk space allows.
After which, it starts clearing the oldest backups.

 I use CarbonCopyCloner to backup manually when I want to. The only problem with it it that it is quite slow at working out what to copy. If I've only changed a few documents, it still takes nearly an hour to trawl through the entire drive before copying just those few altered / new files. There was also a problem at one stage where it would hang during that phase of working out what to copy and eventually stop with an error, but updating to a slightly newer version seems to have fixed that.

Whereas Time Machine works so quickly and seamlessly that you never have to worry about it.
Time Machine just set up by turning it on is the best answer for 99% of Mac users.