How to Safe-Sleep Your Mac

One of the few useful features WinXP has that OSX doesn’t have is “Hibernate”. WinXP is able, upon power loss, to save the contents of a sleeping PC’s RAM to disk, so that the system state and user data isn’t lost.

OSX’s sleep feature drains power, albeit slowly. On my work iBook, it can sleep for just about 3 days with no power, before it goes dead.

The new Powerbooks have a feature that is called ‘Safe Sleep’, which is pretty much ‘Hibernate’. Since the feature is software-based, it’s fairly easy to implement on non-Powerbook Macs.