Do utilities run while sleeping?

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After doing the experiment myself, I found they had not been run.
So use Screen Saver instead of Energy Saver if you leave your machine overnight.

The tasks can be run manually by Macjanitor or Anacron.

Other utilities which do these manually are like swiss army knives, and should not be used except in troubleshooting systems which are already backed up.
You should backup your data anyway, as my FAQ* explains:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

* Links to my pages may give me compensation.

No they don't run when the unit is sleeping. Onyx is a great free app, but it you buy Cocktail, you can program that to run the tasks at a specific time.

This Maintidget 1.0 widget is handy at monitoring and manually running the scripts also.

http://www.macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=9738

- Bmer
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Disclaimer required by Apple Discussions Terms of Use: MacOSG - a non-profit Apple User Group - may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Please excuse my lack of knowledge but could you tell me where I need to look to see if the 2 a.m check up has actually taken place as I left my Macbook Pro on last night on screen saver mode ? is there a place where a date and time are displayed ?

Mac Book Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) Photography, motoring, European travel

Your system logs will tell you that info, or use the Maintidget 1.0 widget I pointed out above.

- Bmer
Mac Owners Support Group
Join Us @ MacOSG.com
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Thank you, the link and the program are perfect for my needs.

Mac Book Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) Photography, motoring, European travel

Also check out Macaroni - it does exactly what you are looking for without any manual intervention.

It's available here: http://atomicbird.com/macaroni

Great little app.

You don't even need bother download third party apps to run your cron scripts. You can do it yourself and it's far more reliable:-

Using your Admin account, you can execute all three maintenance scripts at once, as follows:

Launch Terminal, in the Computer > Mac OS X > Applications > Utilities folder.

1.At the prompt, type the following, exactly as written:
sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

2. Press Return.

3. Type your Admin password when prompted, then press Return.

All three scripts will run in sequence. There is no visual feedback while the scripts execute. You will know they are completed when the Terminal prompt returns.

You can also run the scripts individually. For example, to run just the daily script, you would type the command

sudo periodic daily
in step 3 above.

Of course you can run these scripts manually. As for being "far more reliable", however... you have to remember to run the scripts manually. Most users won't remember to do this, and the scripts will rarely, if ever, get run. My sister's ibook is a good example - the daily and weekly scripts hadn't been run for ages. By automating the process, you are ensured that the scripts always fire.

More info from apple here (scroll down to "running a process on a schedule")

Of particular note to the OP: In 10.4 and later, if the computer is asleep when the job is scheduled to run, it will be executed when the computer wakes up. If the computer is off, the job does not run at all.

thanks everyone for the info.

Steven,

Well you could make a calendar event in iCal to remind you to run these scripts and you could use Automator to do it for you.

Call me old fashioned but I'd prefer to rely on what Apple have given me to play around with my $4500 Mac. 🙂