Is Safe Sleep necessary?

[ViennaXP]

Hello,
I started OmniDiskSweeper and it found a 17 GB file called "sleepimage". On a 256 SSD Drive this is "really" big and a waste of space.
I googled a bit and found out that it is a file used for the "Safe Sleep", but many sites state that "Safe sleep" is not needed anymore since OS X Lion because of the "Resume" Feature.
Is this true? Is it safe to turn Safe Sleep off (Yes I know, when the battery dies the sleeping system dies ,too)?

 

[alex0002]

Loss of power during sleep (without hibernate) due to battery failure, is unlikely to be any worse than loss of power to an iMac or Mac Mini without a UPS. Or for that matter, the loss of power to any running Linux or Windows desktop. You have a journalled file system and you might loose a file that was open and unsaved at the time, but the file system integrity should be protected.

 

[ViennaXP]

Yeah didn't mean the whole system dies... but maybe open files are gone.
unfortunate choice of words 😀