I recently replaced a 2020 27 inch iMac with a Mac mini M4 Pro. I love everything about the new mini except for the sleep issues I am having, which I think are related to Time Machine.
Basically, the Mac mini just won't stay asleep. It typically won't go to sleep unless I put it to sleep manually, and then it will wake itself up regularly and mostly stay awake, punctuated with brief sleep episodes. I bought Sleep Aid so I could have a good sense of what the mini was doing when I wasn't around.
My TM volume is an HDD in an external enclosure, and I have about 3 TB of data that needs to be backed up. After the initial TM backup, I know that Spotlight would index TM, so I manually disabled sleep in Settings so the Spotlight indexing process could run 24/7 until it was done, and after about a week, the constant thrashing of the TM volume stopped. But, every time TM makes a backup, no matter how small, the TM drive starts to thrash again, and I can see that Activity Monitor is showing a lot of activity with mds.scan, mds.power, mds_stores, and mds_stores.power, all of which are Spotlight related. And, the sleep issues return.
I thought that the issues with constant indexing would stop if I set TM to back up only manually, and then I did not trigger it for a while. That seemed to work for a while (sleep got better), but then, without a TM back up being made, the drive will start thrashing again and I can see in Activity Monitor that the Spotlight processes that are running a lot and using a fair amount of CPU.
The M4 mini is relatively new, so there may not be a lot of information out about potential issues with sleep and Time Machine, but I'm wondering what the experience of others is, in particular, are there others with a similar set up (TM in an external enclosure with an HDD) and are having absolutely no problems at all with sleep or with their TM drive thrashing away while indexing? And are there others having a similar issue?
It's probably worth mentioning that I used Setup Assistant to migrate everything from the Intel iMac to the new M4 pro mini.
Basically, the Mac mini just won't stay asleep. It typically won't go to sleep unless I put it to sleep manually, and then it will wake itself up regularly and mostly stay awake, punctuated with brief sleep episodes. I bought Sleep Aid so I could have a good sense of what the mini was doing when I wasn't around.
My TM volume is an HDD in an external enclosure, and I have about 3 TB of data that needs to be backed up. After the initial TM backup, I know that Spotlight would index TM, so I manually disabled sleep in Settings so the Spotlight indexing process could run 24/7 until it was done, and after about a week, the constant thrashing of the TM volume stopped. But, every time TM makes a backup, no matter how small, the TM drive starts to thrash again, and I can see that Activity Monitor is showing a lot of activity with mds.scan, mds.power, mds_stores, and mds_stores.power, all of which are Spotlight related. And, the sleep issues return.
I thought that the issues with constant indexing would stop if I set TM to back up only manually, and then I did not trigger it for a while. That seemed to work for a while (sleep got better), but then, without a TM back up being made, the drive will start thrashing again and I can see in Activity Monitor that the Spotlight processes that are running a lot and using a fair amount of CPU.
The M4 mini is relatively new, so there may not be a lot of information out about potential issues with sleep and Time Machine, but I'm wondering what the experience of others is, in particular, are there others with a similar set up (TM in an external enclosure with an HDD) and are having absolutely no problems at all with sleep or with their TM drive thrashing away while indexing? And are there others having a similar issue?
It's probably worth mentioning that I used Setup Assistant to migrate everything from the Intel iMac to the new M4 pro mini.
