multiple scheduled backups?

[Dan Lester]

OK, so I have an SSD for my nightly backup. I set up my Mac to wake at 1:59am every night,and set SuperDuper to copy at 2am every night. Works great. I happen to have another disk that I might as well use to do a second backup. Say, at 3am. But my Mac (iMacM1,Monterey) won't allow me to schedule a second wake-up time. I can schedule to wake at 1:59am every day of the week, or 1:59am on Tuesday. But I cannot schedule a wake on Tuesday and Thursday, nor at 1:59am and 2:59am on any day. Yes, I can set the wake time long enough to do two consecutive backups, but then I have to put up with my display being illuminated for lots longer than it has to be illuminated ALL THE TIME. I guess this is more of an OS issue than a SuperDuper issue, but ...

Options? Sure would be nice if SuperDuper could do it's own "wake".

[dnanian]

SuperDuper *does* do its own wake. In fact, if you look with pmset -g sched, you can see it.

[Dan Lester]

Hmm. Thank you. That's interesting. But I've got a problem. I set up to do a backup on disk #1 at 2am. I set the Mac in Energy Saver to "wake" at 1:59am. That backup proceeds flawlessly. I also set up to do a backup on disk #2 at 2am, without any special "wake" instruction before that. That backup never happens. "Turn display off" is set to 10 minutes. Now, I do have "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off" checked. so it SHOULD not be going to sleep. I guess I really don't understand how to diagnose what's going on. Once the screen is dimmed, how do you establish that the Mac is (or was) actually awake?

[dnanian]

Do you see the SuperDuper wake event in your pmset info?

[Dan Lester]

I have two SuperDuper backups scheduled. One at 2:30am,and the other at 2:45am. I have commanded a wake at 2:29am in Energy saver. This is what my pmset -g sched shows.

Repeating power events:
wakepoweron at 2:29AM every day
Scheduled power events:
[0] wake at 04/21/23 02:30:00 by 'sdbackupbytime'

I gather that sdbackupbytime at 2:30am is from SuperDuper, and the other is from Energy Saver, but I don't see one scheduled for the 2:45am backup from SuperDuper. Last night it was the second backup that wasn't happening.

[dnanian]

The 2:45am one would be scheduled after the 2:30am one. We only set a wake for the next one...and when that happens, the one after that.

Sounds like your mac isn't waking properly, or is taking multiple minutes to wake up.

[Dan Lester]

Oh, so the 2:45am wake won't be set by SuperDuper until AFTER the 2:30am backup is done? Well, at least this is telling me that SuperDuper IS setting at least one wake-up.

Why doesn't SuperDuper just set all wake-ups corresponding to the whole list of scheduled copies? Can't you set multiple wake-up times with pmset? I have two wake-ups set right now. One from SuperDuper and the other from Energy Saver.

I would like to know how to diagnose what's going on here. BTW, I can MANUALLY do the second backup, so there isn't anything about the disk not being available.

As an aside, speaking of manual backups, I've just realized that the "Last Copy" listed in the Scheduled Copies list is the last SCHEDULED copy. Manual copies don't appear there.

[dnanian]

Last question first - yes, it's the last scheduled copy. That's why it's in the scheduled copies window. That's why "Next Copy" is the next time that schedule is going to run.

We don't set "all the wake-ups" because it doesn't make any sense to do so. We set the next wake when pass the current wake.

I think, as I said, the problem is that your Mac is taking a long time to wake - perhaps > 1 minute.

The way to diagnose this would seem to be to have it wake while you're watching it, rather than at 2am. Also - you don't have to "space out" your backups. If you have one set for 2am and one for 2:45, to try to have the 2nd start after the first, just set them both for 2am (or one for 2 and one for 2:01 to control the order). They'll run back to back.

[Dan Lester]

I was going to ask that, about just scheduling them back-to-back. That is, if I scheduled one for 2:00am, and the second for 2:01am, even though the first one didn't finish until 2:05am, the second one will still run. That's excellent, because the Mac won't have had time to go to sleep. I was worried that the second one would just get skipped because it missed the schedule.

I'll investigate by scheduling everything so I can watch it all but, in the long run, this back-to-back scheduling might be the ideal solution. I will try that.

Thanks for pointing me at pmset. I guess Energy Saver is just a front end for pmset with more limited capabilities. I should wonder if I can just use pmset to schedule both wakes. On looking at the man page, pmset is awfully complicated. I tried a few pmset statements to schedule repeat wakes, and kept getting errors.

Now, as I said earlier, I am puzzled that I DO have the "Prevent your Mac from automatically sleeping when the display is off" box checked. So, to the extent this problem is because the Mac isn't waking up, why is it going to sleep in the first place???

[Dan Lester]

Unfortunately, the back-to-back backups didn't work. I scheduled a backup to disk #1 at 8:00am, and to disk #2 at 8:01am. The first backup went normally (and ended at 8:03am), but the second one never happened. Nothing went to sleep. Somewhat oddly, the log was not updated. Still showing the log from yesterday's backup.

[dnanian]

This doesn't make any sense, Dan. If you schedule them now for, say, 3 minutes from now and four minutes from now, then wait (no sleep), what happens?

[Dan Lester]

OK, I did some more testing, and it's pretty weird. It is NOT an issue of scheduled back-to-back backups not working. It's an issue of ONE scheduled backup not working. My two backups are (1) to a Western Digital Passport SSD, and (2) a Western Digital Sabrent spinning disk drive. When I schedule both, only the SSD backup happens. The Sabrent JUST DOESN'T happen. Nothing happens at that scheduled time. SuperDuper doesn't even open. When I do manual backups, each backs up properly. For some reason I cannot successfully SCHEDULE the Sabrent drive.

In Disk Utility, when I look at these disks, they all seem to be set up the same way. GUID partition map, APFS. What's going on???

[dnanian]

What is the name of the drive that's not working?

[Dan Lester]

OK. I figured it out. Geez Louise. Many days ago I had to rebuild my system, and my internal hard drive is normally named "Shadowfax". After a few days I noticed that it actually somehow got named "shadowfax". I corrected it (figuring it was just a very very minor correction) but only after I had scheduled some SuperDuper copies! So, the SuperDuper Scheduled Copies script was trying to copy "Shadowfax" to one disk, and "shadowfax" to another. But "shadowfax" didn't exist anymore! I never deleted and reentered all the SuperDuper scheduled copies, which was dumb. I just edited the time/date on the schedules that were already there, so that internal boot disk name change didn't get fixed. As a result, when the SuperDuper scheduling script tried to copy from "shadowfax", it wasn't there, and SuperDuper just didn't do anything (and no errors appeared). When you want to do a copy from the main SuperDuper window, of course, what appears there is the properly named "Shadowfax", because that's the disk that it sees there, and the copy works fine. That's why manual backups were all successful to both disks. Now that the naming is fixed in Scheduled Copies, everything works properly, and back-to-back scheduled copies work perfectly, like you said they should. Thank you!

But I might suggest that when SuperDuper can't find a disk it is being asked to schedule a copy to or from, it ought to pop up some error! Very sorry about all this, but I think this lesson might be a useful one.

[dnanian]

That's actually not likely what was going on, since we don't look for drives by name (save to mount them). Rather, you rebuilt your system and the source drive no longer matched the low-level ID it had before, and you had the schedule set to not notify when drives are missing. So, it didn't...