How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac

Published: 2005-11-18 10:30:30

Safe-Sleep is a software feature introduced in the Mac OS update 10.4.3, allowing Macs to save RAM contents to the hard drive and enter a low-power sleep mode. This is particularly useful for conserving battery life. A guide is available to activate Safe-Sleep on standard Apple hardware using terminal commands, making it accessible beyond just new PowerBooks.

How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac

I've been ignoring all the news about Safe-Sleep so far as I always thought that it'd be new-powerbooks only, but seems I was wrong. Although Apple says that it's a feature of the new powerbooks it's actually a Software-Feature which comes with 10.4.3.

When using Safe-Sleep (in contrast to the normal sleep we Mac users know and love) your mac saves the contents of your ram to the harddrive, and then falls to a sleep-mode which doesn't need any additional power. That's great, for example, if battery power is limited.

Andrew Escobar has a guide that explains how to activate Safe Sleep using standard Apple Hardware (that is not-new Powerbooks or iBooks, and maybe even your Desktop) by applying some terminal voodoo

I'd love to try this with my G5, but I've got 2.5gigs of ram in here and I guess the process of writing 2.5gigs of ram to the disk everytime I set it to sleep can be quite frustrating. However, I'm gonna try this with my Powerbook, I'm using it frequently in conditions where Safe-Sleep would come in handy

How to Safe Sleep (Hibernate) Your Mac - AndrewEscobar.com