Ventura (13.0.1), overnight sleep mode, and Time Machine

Question

Level 1

58 points

Ventura (13.0.1), overnight sleep mode, and Time Machine

tl;dr - When I leave my 2018 iMac on overnight with Ventura and Time Machine, I am seeing what I believe to be unusual, disconcerting behavior. I am not really sure my Mac is sleeping and am concerned about missing settings with Ventura (that were not needed with Monterey) to assure proper TM operation overnight. It seems that I can either have the Mac sleep overnight OR have TM operate properly overnight, but not both.

The long version:

I am a long-time Mac user but I never started the habit of leaving my machine on overnight - it has to do with paranoia from a hacking story a very long time ago. But I have read many times over the years that Apple prefers the devices left on, presumably because boot-up performance is so bad (yes, updates too). So I convinced myself to try it during Monterey.

I also started using Time Machine during Monterey - previously, I did my backups manually.

All well and good with Monterey. It seemed that my iMac was indeed sleeping. I was not sure quite what TM was doing but did not notice problems.

I recently upgraded to Ventura (13.0.1), and now I have a lot of concerns. The option to leave the disks running while the display is off (“Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off”) is now defaulted to “true.” As a result, when logging on in the morning, the password dialog box came up “instantly”, indicating it had not been sleeping. My assumption anyway.

I turned that switch to “false” two days ago, and now it seems to be sleeping. BUT there is some odd behavior with the external SSD I am using with TM. I heard it last night apparently coming on (well, the internal fan) several times, and again this morning. These attempts occurred within a couple of minutes of each other, not at all like a TM update. When I logged in, I saw that my Mac was trying to connect to the external drive. I had never noticed that message with Monterey. And both days, the last backup was the night before, not what I expected to see. Clearly nothing is (supposed to be) happening at night so there would be no physical backups but TM should acknowledge the attempts as scheduled. I assume.

After logging in, backups resumed once the connection was restored to the TM SSD.

Somehow, my external SSD trying to connect over and over* does not seem like a good thing - so I assume it’s because I set that “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off” switch to “false.” But if I set it back to “true,”I assume my Mac is NOT sleeping. That is a contradiction of goals.

Can anyone clarify what if anything I am doing wrong with Ventura? Maybe it’s just my expectations.

*that is what seems to have been going on, anyway, last night and this morning

iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 13.0

Posted on Nov 27, 2022 11:07 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

James Brickley

Level 5

5,686 points

Nov 27, 2022 10:04 PM in response to chuckefus

In Energy Saver try turning off Wake for network access which states, "While sleeping, your Mac can receive incoming network traffic, such as Messages and other iCloud updates to keep your applications up to date". It was formerly known as the Power Nap feature.

There have been issues with wake from sleep and connecting to an external drive and running Time Machine. My guess is that Power Nap woke the machine the external SSD was powered up and perhaps there's a timing wait loop that is failing or something and Time Machine has an error. These are bugs that Apple likely will fix as they did with early Monterey versions. But if your Mac is asleep, then you aren't using it. So what is there to backup? Nothing... A subsequent backup after you login is fine.

Reply

Answer 2

tbirdvet

Level 6

17,060 points

Nov 28, 2022 8:56 AM in response to chuckefus

I would not worry about SSD "abuse". Also I have always shut down my Mac at night (on auto set) and auto start in AM and never had ant hardware issues. Mac runs better after a clean boot up anyway.

Reply

Answer 3

chuckefus Author

Level 1

58 points

Nov 28, 2022 5:23 AM in response to James Brickley

Thanks for that reply. I was not aware of that, and I will look into those suggestions.

I had two concerns in the OP, but the one related to TM is not that a backup would be missed - clearly TM catches up eventually. It was the obvious reconnect attempts that I could hear throughout the night and the next morning. The external SSD (LaCie 2TB) has internal fan noise with each attempt, usage.... I am concerned, in this case, about abuse of the SSD and possible HW failure. I did not make that clear in the OP.

Thanks again.

Reply

Answer 4

chuckefus Author

Level 1

58 points

Nov 28, 2022 3:08 PM in response to tbirdvet

Thanks. But it was a bit unnerving to hear it start up and then shut down (at least its fan) every five minutes or so, as the machine was apparently trying to reconnect with it overnight. Nothing is forever, but a backup disk is a bad thing to fail when you need. Not sure if they were designed for such an exercise each and every night. It clearly does this hourly under normal circumstances.

Now, if someone were to tell me that this overnight behavior is to be expected ... since I am newbie with leaving this machine on, and using TM.

Yes, a good reboot does a world of good sometimes. There is a slight problem with my network (although maybe Apple has fixed it finally in Ventura, still trying to understand that) that prevents me from using an auto-boot.

Reply

Ventura (13.0.1), overnight sleep mode, and Time Machine

Similar questions