Hmmm, maybe it will work... I started the following shell script
#!/bin/sh i=1 while true do echo $i i=`expr $i + 1 ` done
I forced the system to sleep for a few seconds, woke it up and the script kept on trucking...
While you always want to avoid doing things that push the limits of the system while you're backing it up, in theory, all the timing issues should be handled by the drivers before they allow the system to go to sleep. Or, if some hardware job is in progress when the system goes to sleep, the hardware should be waking the system up to finish the process.
So it _should_ keep on trucking. If it doesn't, it's a system bug, and needs to be reported.
But risking dropping your backups to find Apple's bugs may or may not be what you want to do, and you can be sure that backups won't proceed while the system is asleep.
I think this question has come up before, but if there is an API for the Energy Saving settings (or whatever those are in English), I think I'd want to have my backup script set the system to not sleep while the backup was in progress, and then restore the setting when done. Until that part is working, I'd change the setting by hand, of course.
-- Joel Rees
