Why is SuperDuper not running at scheduled time?

[Chris_Porter]

I expected to wake up this morning with a completed backup on one of my external hard drives, since the script calls for it to run every Friday morning at 12:30am. However, no backup was made, and after launching SuperDuper to investigate, I found that it didn't run at all, and neither had the backup for Monday morning (on another hard drive). How do I find out what was happening that stopped SuperDuper from running these backups? (what log should I check, etc). There didn't appear to be any problem when I woke up, and all external hard drives were on (but not mounted). I ran diagnostics on the externals, TechTools said they were just fine.

I have full backups scheduled for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. Only the Wednesday backup had been completed for this week! I need to know what's stopping the other backups from running.

[dnanian]

Do you have a wake event set for one minute before the scheduled backup time? See the User's Guide section on "Scheduling" for the various requirements...

[Chris_Porter]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Do you have a wake event set for one minute before the scheduled backup time? See the User's Guide section on "Scheduling" for the various requirements...

Yes, of course I do, this is a long-standing script (set of three scripts), and the computer is woken 5 minutes before scheduled backup. Normally the scripts have worked, so I need to find out why they haven't been working--what log should I look in, and what activities do I need to note that made Monday's and Friday's backup not work, but Wednesday's backup complete?

[dnanian]

Five minutes, though, is not one minute. It needs to be one minute, Chris...

[Chris_Porter]

Originally Posted by dnanian

Five minutes, though, is not one minute. It needs to be one minute, Chris...

Why does it need to be one minute, when it's worked for months and months with 5 minutes?
eta: It worked on Wednesday, with the 5 minute startup. It's worked for months with the 5 minute startup. I'm thinking this is not the issue.

[dnanian]

Because if it's more than one minute, your mac will sometimes go to sleep before we can start, regardless of your sleep setting... as you're seeing.

[UniAce]

I want to second Chris_Porter's problem/confusion.
I too had no idea that 1-minute-ahead-of-backup was the required time for wakeup. I too reasoned that, say, using Energy Saver to wake up the computer 10 minutes before backup would be fine if the computer was also set to go to sleep only after 20min of inactivity. And I too am finding that my scheduled backups don't always happen.

In fact, sometimes the backup that should have happened at 2am instead begins when I wake up the computer when I get up in the morning at, say, 9am.

I can try setting wakeup for just 1 minute before backup, but this is an inadequate solution because I actually have 2 other quick routines that I want to have run before SD does its full backup (MailSteward and an applescript I wrote to make versioned copies of iCal and AddressBook databases).

[dnanian]

There's really not much I can do about the fact that the OS puts the Mac to sleep quickly, UniAce... if we can't even get started before it goes to sleep, there's no way for us to keep it awake.

[UniAce]

I know it's not your fauly; I understand.
I wish this general issue of scheduled wakeups and subsequent sleep was more widely known. There must be other contexts in which users are affected by this. I wonder if anyone elsewhere was made progress in udnerstanding why it happens or what might be done about it.