Safe Sleep is basically a 'deeper sleep' feature that debuted on the 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks last year, and as far as I know, it's included (and enabled by default) on all of Apple's MacBook/Pro portables (and yes, I hear it's basically like the Windows 'Hibernate' state). This deep sleep differs from the typical Sleep state that most of us are used to: it writes everything currently in memory (your open apps, the files you're working on, etc.) to the hard drive, and actually powers down the machine, saving the battery power that slowly siphons during the normal Sleep mode. Waking from this mode naturally takes a little longer, and a progress bar unique to this feature is displayed while the machine is waking from Safe Sleep. If you want to see it in action, Rob Griffiths (of Macworld and Mac OS X Hints fame) posted a good video demonstration of Safe Sleep on his black MacBook (so jealous!) to YouTube. By default, the new MacBook/Pro behavior is to use a little of both worlds: they write everything to the drive while they're going to sleep, but still use 'regular Sleep' unless power is lost from both AC and the battery. If power is lost, the machine switches over to Safe Sleep automatically - yet another reason to send those Apple engineers a batch of cookies. But what if you want to bypass the regular Sleep status and use Safe Sleep by default all the time?
Enter the Deep Sleep Dashboard widget - one-click access to putting your Mac down for an extended nap. Documentation is included with the widget explaining what's going on, and it also has a list of the machines known to support this feature. To top things off, if you just aren't a fan of widgets, the author also packaged Deep Sleep as a simple command line utility, linked in small print at the bottom of Deep Sleep's page.
[via MacUser]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-28-2006 @ 2:18PM
Alex said...
Is there a way to disable Safe Sleep? It takes my MBP like 20 seconds to go to sleep because of it and it's pretty annoying.
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11-28-2006 @ 2:31PM
Jason said...
Check this Macworld article: http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macosxhints/2006/10/sleepmode/index.php
You can also delete the large file used for it safely after disabling safe sleep. It saved 2 gigs on my drive. ;)
I find safe sleep not useful enough for me, but the author of this widget has done a good job.
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11-28-2006 @ 3:13PM
Eric J said...
love it love it love it... I used to use a Hibernation preference pane, but this is a much simpler solution.
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11-28-2006 @ 4:04PM
Adrian said...
Here's a tutorial that tells you how to activate safe sleep on most Macs.
http://www.andrewescobar.com/archive/2005/11/11/how-to-safe-sleep-your-mac%20/
It also tells you how to disable it completely, in Terminal:
"sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0"
I actually like that name. Back with my Powerbook G4 I used safe sleep as default, I always thought Apple should enable this feature openly and call it Deep Sleep. That name works well to hint what the function actually does.
I never set my MacBook Pro to go to safe sleep by default and I actually wanted an easy way to send my Mac to safe sleep when I wanted it.
This is exactly what I need, thanks a lot!
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11-28-2006 @ 4:36PM
Andy said...
juts downloaded this, sounded good, im a student and i often take my macbook and dont think about taking the power brick, figured it would save me some battery.
aftre reading all the documentation, installed it and ran it, worked as advertised
then i realized that after coming back awake my built in keyboard wouldnt work, nothing, the caps lock key wouldnt even light. had to plug in an external keyboard and reset the hibernationmode in terminal.
diving into terminal is not for the faint of heart! things that mess with the kernel like this can eff you computer pretty hard! try it out, but make sure u know how to fix it before u end up with a brick!
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11-28-2006 @ 4:58PM
Mark D. said...
I've had the Deep Sleep widget for a while, and it fulfills one thing I missed and liked having full control of in Windows but only limited control of in OS X. The only thing that could make this widget better is a moon phase version!
I do have one issue, and it's actually with the Safe Sleep mode, which seems to commandeer your system when you boot. Unlike hibernating in XP, which you can leave in-tact and switch to another boot partition, safe sleep seems to make itself the only option. This isn't an issue until you want to do some quick OS switching. Sure OS X boots fast, but I'd like to have the frozen snapshot of my open applications at hand like I do with XP's hibernation. Of course I can't say I'm unhappy with the feature, as it ensures I never lose my data when I sleep my laptop.
Alex: I agree, it's a bit annoying since I often want to grab the machine right away, but would rather not jostle the drive as it's doing a rather heavy write.
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11-29-2006 @ 4:30AM
Ian said...
I have had the widget for a while, but I stopped using it when I realized that you can reliably achieve Deep Sleep every time (on a MBP) by unplugging the power just before shutting the lid. If the power LED stays on steady instead of pulsing, it is writing the hibernation image. It will turn off after 30-60 seconds and the machine is fully turned off at that point.
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11-29-2006 @ 6:59AM
Jarkko Laiho said...
If you're using any kind of encrypted storage, Safe Sleep is a very, VERY bad idea. This article needs a LOT more press:
http://www.karppinen.fi/2006/11/22/turn-off-safe-sleep-now/
An excerpt:
"Everything in your Mac’s memory is stored on disk, in unencrypted form, whenever your Mac goes to sleep." (Safe Sleep, that is, not regular sleep)
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11-29-2006 @ 11:25PM
Brian Ashe said...
Yes, Deep Sleep might be the best single feature of my new MacBook. My old iBook (G3/800) didn't have this feature. Quite the opposite, in fact: if you left it asleep long enough to drain the battery, not only would you lose all your work*, it would also drain the PRAM battery, causing the Mac to think it was January 1, 1969 upon the next boot.
* OK, I never lost actual "work"--at the very least, I'd save all my open docs before sleeping--but you lose state: open windows, open applications, etc.
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