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I am backing up remotely from a Macbook Pro to an external backup drive on a PowerMac G5 via Time Machine and AFP. When the G5 goes to sleep, the Macbook Pro can't back up because the drive is made unavailable. How do I get the G5 to wake up while the Macbook Pro is backing up, and to go to sleep after the Macbook Pro is done backing up?

The MacBookPro is on Snow Leopard and the G5 (Early 2005) is running Leopard so I can't just use the normal sleep proxy / Wake On Demand or have an airport do the waking up whenever Time Machine tries to connect to the AFP share.

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What os on the G5 and what model (early 2006) - there might be network wake support that is easily scriptable – bmike♦ Aug 8 '11 at 15:20
Here is the model:everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac_g5/stats/… and it is running 10.5.8 – daviesgeek Aug 8 '11 at 15:44
Excellent - the manual is less helpful - but WOL is the best option for waking it. The hard nut is going to be getting the notification of Time Machine early enough to schedule the wake a minute or so early to allow the share to be ready. Also 10.5 on the MBP? – bmike♦ Aug 8 '11 at 17:23
MBP: 10.6.8, and what is WOL? – daviesgeek Aug 8 '11 at 18:11
WakeOnLan is a general acronym. If you had an airport extreme or express - you could use the sleep proxy service - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… by upgrading the G5 to 10.6 – bmike♦ Aug 8 '11 at 18:25
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2 Answers

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You could use cron, or use the energy saver > schedules to wake your power G5 up.

This post might help you as well superuser.com this other post might also help you, ont the apple website.

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Yeah...what I'm looking for is a way to wake up the G5 from the Macbook Pro when Time Machine is starting to backup. – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 19:54
I checked and I do have "Wake for Ethernet Administrator Access" on (the second post you recommended). – daviesgeek Jul 22 '11 at 22:46
Is there another way? – daviesgeek Jul 23 '11 at 17:48
You could use wake on lan, but I don't have any other ideas yet. I found this link – noktec Jul 23 '11 at 20:03
I didn't try WakeOnLan. I don't have the Developer tools installed, and I don't have the disk space right now. – daviesgeek Jul 27 '11 at 23:37
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The simplest solution to making sure that your G5 is backed up regularly is to disable its going to sleep. In System Preferences, under Energy Saver, you can set the G5 to never go to sleep, and you can un-check the option "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible". This will increase the energy usage of your computer, for sure, but if regular backups are more important, I suggest you consider this solution.

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Yeah...the G5 is a somewhat quirky computer, so it needs to go to sleep when possible. – daviesgeek Aug 8 '11 at 18:45
On the plus side - it's still running and saving you from needing another backup server :-) – bmike♦ Aug 9 '11 at 22:16

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