James Closs wrote:
OK, since setting my machine not to sleep this hasn't happened so clearly it's sleep that's the problem (for me anyway).
That seems to be the case for me as well. I've been tracking this for three days - Noting when I've put the computer to sleep, how, and for how long, and how I wake it, and what TM Preferences Window has to say. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason about this - the computer can be asleep for many hours, overnight in fact, and wake without ejecting the TM drive; it can be asleep for 5 minutes and eject it. The ejecting happens whether the "Put drives to sleep..." is checked or unchecked.
I have noticed that when I allow the computer to go to sleep on its own, it takes between 10 and 15 minutes for the power light to go to blinking mode. Initially I have a solid light. If I wake the computer while the light is solid, it wakes fine without ejecting (and I can wake it by moving the mouse). It seems that the ejecting is more likely when the power light is blinking (that's true even when I've gone to sleep using the power button). No matter how the computer goes to sleep (power light blinking), I can no longer wake it by moving the mouse, I have to click the mouse or hit a key.
When the computer wakes without ejecting the drive, the TM Preferences say: "Making backup disk available...", then "Calculating changes...", then it does the backup - but it doesn't always do the backup immediately, it sometimes waits until the next scheduled time.
When the computer wakes and the TM disk is ejected, the TM Preferences say: "Next backup when disk is connected...", it connects the disk - it shows in my case, blue, on the desktop, then "Calculating changes..", does the backup - I'm not sure that it does the backup every time when the TM disk remounts - that's the next thing I have to watch for - I didn't catch that in my notes.
