The Insomniac Time Traveler

WARNING: More techy post than usual today. But I guess that definitely makes it count as Something Completely Different, doesn't it?

For the past year or so, I've had an issue with my Mac where it lost the ability to automatically go into sleep mode, in which it uses extremely little power, instead just sitting there idle until I manually put it to sleep. I tried to determine the problem, but eventually I gave up and figured it was an issue where I'd have to reinstall the OS, which I didn't really want to do. When I bought my new iMac, at first it would sleep correctly, then it refused to, just like my old Mac. I worked more intentionally towards solving this issue over the past week, and I eventually narrowed the cause down to my USB hub. If you don't know, it's a small device that turns one port on the computer into several, so you can plug in more devices. If this hub is not plugged in, my iMac will go to sleep when it's supposed to.

Now, on to a second issue. Apple has an integrated backup facility called Time Machine built into its operating system. I have an external hard drive that I bought almost a year ago for the purpose of these Time Machine backups. It has always worked great, but a few days ago it started exhibiting strange behaviour and would not work correctly. I spent a fair amount of time troubleshooting and looking up error messages online. Nothing I tried seemed to help and I was starting to think it may need to be sent to the manufacturer for repairs or replacement. Fortunately it's just a backup drive, and I also have two separate backups, so it wasn't that much of an issue, aside from the inconvenience.

Long story short, I eventually determined these two issues to be indirectly related. As a part of my troubleshooting, I switched this drive to being plugged directly into the iMac (so I could remove the USB hub), rather than one of the ports on my hub. It seems that for some reason the drive doesn't like that. It only works fine when plugged into the hub. I can't say whether this is a new issue or not, as I think this was the first time since I bought it that I didn't have it plugged into the hub.

So, it appears that I can have either operational Time Machine backups but no automatic sleep mode, or an iMac that goes to sleep but can't update the Time Machine backup. Maybe I'll eventually find a solution, but for now I think I'll give it a rest (no pun intended). Unless my math was wrong, it looks like the difference in power usage between it idling and sleeping will only cost about $1.50 per month tops. And there are other benefits to not letting it sleep (which I won't go into at this time), so perhaps those benefits will actually be worth paying the extra $1.50 for. But still, I don't like not knowing why the drive behaves this way (if it is a hardware issue, it's still under warranty) so I'll probably do some more diagnostics and research as time permits.