Put your Mac to Safe Sleep (Hibernate)

Booting from Safe Sleep

So you Windows users know that there is a feature in Windows called Hibernation. This puts your computer into a sleep mode where it doesn’t consume any power, but it saves all your setting and everything you were doing. Well this hasn’t been available on the Mac and with the introduction of the new PowerBooks there is an option called ‘Safe Sleep’.

According to an Apple article:
Safe Sleep ensures that data stored in main memory will not be lost should the system shut down due to a loss of power during sleep mode. Prior to your system entering sleep, Safe Sleep automatically saves the contents of main memory […] to the hard drive. In the event the battery becomes completely depleted while the system is asleep, the computer will shut down. But when a power adapter is connected or a freshly charged battery is installed, the PowerBook can be restarted and it will automatically return to the desktop state that existed prior to entering sleep.

When starting up from safe sleep mode, a progress bar indicates that the computer is waking from sleep while the background is in grayscale and blurred. I managed to take a picture with my camera which can be seen above and small thumbnails below.

Before Safe Sleep Booting from Safe Sleep
The thumbnails above show my mac before safe sleep [left image] and my mac during the bootup from safe sleep [right image]

Safe Sleep is so-far only officially available on the new PowerBooks. But Safe Sleep is very much software based , not hardware based. With Apple’s release of mac OS 10.4.3, Safe Sleep can be enabled on many Macs thanks to an excellent hack. To do so first insure Mac OS X, is up-to-date to with version 10.4.3 (or above). If not, run Software Update.

This worked fine for me, but I think I will disable it until I need to use it as I like the instant-on function of my Mac Mini. One thing to note is that during normal sleep mode my mac would display a ‘pulsating’ light to show it is in sleep mode, but when in safe sleep the light is turned off.

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CAUTION: Proceed with this at your own risk, do not blame me or the ‘author’ of this hack if you do something wrong or it doesn’t work correctly. By clicking the link above you agree to this.


6 Responses to “Put your Mac to Safe Sleep (Hibernate)”  

  1. Gravatar Icon 1 Jaz

    Wow… this is an exact ripoff of the original article on Andrew Escobar’s blog (http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/). I see you even had the guts to add a link in one of his comments pointing to this ripoff. Nice.

  2. Gravatar Icon 2 Balazs

    It’s not a ripoff because I just used what he said in blockquotes. That clearly tells the reader I didn’t write that. The rest is just my opinion and explanation. I linked to his article because it details on how to do it. I just found it interesting and blogged about it. Oh, and the pictures are from my mac so please don’t tell me my posting is an exact rip off.
    And if you don’t know anything of the blogging world then you would know that the link to this article was not done by me but by his blogging software. It is something called a pingback so if you have no clue what those are I suggested you look them up because it seems as you have no ******* clue about anything.

  3. Gravatar Icon 3 Andrew Escobar

    >It’s not a ripoff because [...]

    I would agree, not a rip-off.

    >Oh, and the pictures are from my mac

    And they are off the real thing, so they’re better then my pics. :)
    And he’s correct about the pingbacks.

    Jazz, don’t be so quick to accuse. It’s people “ripping each-others off” that makes communication on the blogsphere work so well.

  4. Gravatar Icon 4 Shaun McDonald

    If you use the right setup, it will only take a while to startup when it has lost the battery power. I used the instructions at http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/ I used sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3 at the last step. As long as you have the phrase “Safe Sleep” appearing in your log files, your OK! You get a fast wake if there has been no power interruption, otherwise it can take around 40 seconds (iBook G4 933MHz).

  5. Gravatar Icon 5 lss

    Hi would someone point to where I can get the full text of AE’s original article..
    .. the site
    http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/
    doesn’t seem to be working.

  6. Gravatar Icon 6 Balazs

    You’ll have to wait, as it looks like Andrew Escobar’s blog is down. Unless you try a google cache of it by typing “cache:http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac/” into Google.




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