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James Brust Author

Level 1

70 points

System keeps waking from sleep every 2 hours

Since Yosemite update, system keeps waking from sleep approx. every 2 hours. It goes back to sleep on its own but keeps waking up again. I have "wake for network access" in System Preferences turned off. Here are samples of the console messages:

10/19/14 1:02:43.000 AM kernel[0]: Wake reason: RTC (Alarm)

10/19/14 1:02:43.000 AM kernel[0]: RTC: Maintenance 2014/10/19 08:02:43, sleep 2014/10/19 06:14:45

10/19/14 3:00:41.000 AM kernel[0]: Wake reason: RTC (Alarm)

10/19/14 3:00:41.000 AM kernel[0]: RTC: Maintenance 2014/10/19 10:00:41, sleep 2014/10/19 08:12:51

I have no idea what "Wake reason: RTC (Alarm)" means. Any help would be appreciated.

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10), 2011 iMac Intel Core i5 12GB RAM

Posted on Oct 19, 2014 5:20 PM

109 replies

Eric Root

Level 10

684,597 points

Apr 5, 2016 10:45 AM in response to gellertsz

Sleep – wakes every 2 hours

Sleep - Why your Mac might not sleep or stay in sleep mode

Sleep - Won’t wake up/won’t stay in sleep

Jul 28, 2016 5:06 AM in response to James Brust

2009 white MacBook, running Mavericks, same issue. I wonder if it might have something to do with iTunes because, a time or two when I happened to catch it in time, I opened the MacBook to see an alert saying: "We could not complete your iTunes Store request. Please try gain later."

Jul 28, 2016 8:30 AM in response to James Brust

Your. Computer is self aware now

Aug 14, 2016 7:32 AM in response to Eric Root

Hi Eric,

I have also seen that my iMac (late 2011) with 10.10.5 wakes every 2 hours. Console output: Wake Reason : RTC (Alarm). So I note the answers for the common issues with this tags and because the Time setting can be an other cause of this I decided to check the Date&Time Preferences. There was checked also the options to set D&T automatically @ an apple time server. I think that unchecking this option (I will control the Time every 1-2 weeks) can give more security.

Ciao

System keeps waking from sleep every 2 hours