MacOS – Do MacBooks have a true “Hibernate” option

hibernatemacbook promacos

I've recently switched from Windows to a MacBook pro. In Windows, there are the following shutdown options:

  • Standby – the machine goes into a "light sleep" from which it can awaken very quickly (like, in a few seconds), but plenty of energy is consumed.

  • Hibernate – the OS dumps the current system state (including the contents of the RAM) to a file, then turns the machine off. Wakeup takes longer than from standby, but there is no latent energy consumption.

  • Shut down – the OS shuts down, and the machine is turned off.

In OS X, what I can see is

  • Sleep – seems equivalent to standby, or an even lighter form of sleep as Mail seems to even continue to poll for new email?

  • Shutdown and restore all apps on next start – turns off machine, seems to start the OS from scratch and restart alls apps – from what I can tell, it's not hibernation

  • Shutdown and don't restore apps – shut down

is this correct, and does OS X not have a true "hibernate" mode that can write its state to disk? Because that's what I'm looking for really. There's talk of a "Safe Sleep" mode on the Internets, but I can't see it in my OS X menu. Is it hidden in 10.7?

Best Answer

Yes, it has a hibernate option. Apple calls it Safe Sleep. When you put the Mac to sleep, OS X dumps the RAM onto the disk and goes to normal sleep (like Windows's Standby). When the battery is too weak to hold the RAM in standby, the computer is turned off. Then it's in the mode you call hibernation which is technically called "ACPI mode S4" or "Suspend-To-Disk".

You can force "Suspend-To-Disk" by disabling the standard sleep via SmartSleep or via pmset on the command line. Its man page has a lot of information on Safe Sleep.

Related Question