Comments on: sleepimage – the Mac OS X sleepimage file explained

By: 7 Advanced Tricks to Reclaim Disk Space for Pro Users of Mac OS X

7 Advanced Tricks to Reclaim Disk Space for Pro Users of Mac OS X — Fri, 10 May 2013 18:44:38 +0000

[...] hibernation function, known as SafeSleep. Essentially, hibernation dumps the contents of RAM to a sleepimage file on the hard disk when a Mac is put to sleep or runs out of battery. That hibernation file is [...]

By: G

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 15:25:46 +0000

It should be 16GB for 16GB of RAM, how did you determine the file size? Enter the command “ls -lh” in that directory to get the file size.

By: Mario

Mario — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:45:19 +0000

Hi JB.

I grepped mine and it’s in “hibernatemode 0″ yet I still get 17GB of SSD occupied by that image file, as I have 16GB of RAM.

Isn’t hibernatemode=0 supposed not to save anything to SSD/HDD?

By: Is Your Mac Slow to Wake from Sleep? Try this pmset Workaround

Is Your Mac Slow to Wake from Sleep? Try this pmset Workaround — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:10:05 +0000

[...] the battery. Basically, standby (and sleep) works by dumping everything out of active RAM into a sleep image file on the hard drive, and then when the Mac wakes from sleep that sleep image file is copied back from [...]

By: W_

W_ — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 18:03:00 +0000

17GB sleepimage… for 16GB RAM… okay…

By: ghostlines

ghostlines — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 20:13:03 +0000

Wonder why the image has to be the minimum size of your ram. Would be cool if it could be only the size of active RAM.

Thx for the informative article and tips in the comments!

By: steve

steve — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 22:42:42 +0000

Be sure to read “man pmset” for the hibernatemode options. only use 0,3,25 or suffer the consequences.
I can’t believe that this feature filled up the entire HD on my Mac Mini and didn’t notice that it was causing the ‘full disk warning’. Eventually I couldn’t even boot, so I had to use Target Disk mode to search and rm the files causing this…. now I’ve switched to mode 0 on hibernatemode. There were some other files created by the timemachine program, some kind of image file. I purged them too and will turn off that ‘instant’ feature of time machine.

By: Hew

Hew — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 12:45:35 +0000

FYI, 12 gb RAM takes about 20 sec to wake up on my 3.06 GHz core i3 desktop

By: Stuart

Stuart — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 16:10:56 +0000

I would think that the only negative is that battery life while asleep would be diminished, as it is actively keeping the RAM contents in RAM as opposed to the disk. Also, if youre laptop dies while asleep, youll lose all your data. I tried changing it, and didnt really notice a difference, it seemed to wake slightly slower though.

By: Avi

Avi — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 01:12:47 +0000

16 Gb. I have 16 GB of ram.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:17:47 +0000

Can this cause any problems in the long run? If I close the lid will it just shut off?

By: Sleep Issues and CUPS « /home/vansmith

Sleep Issues and CUPS « /home/vansmith — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:19:40 +0000

[...] fixing this by repairing permissions in the hope that some file responsible for sleep (such as my sleepimage file) had problematic permissions set. Alas, that didn’t work so I continued my search. I [...]

By: Pathosh

Pathosh — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:40:32 +0000

From man pmset:

Please note that hibernatefile may only point to a file located on the root volume.

By: My Observations on a HDD + SSD Setup « DesertMac's Blog

My Observations on a HDD + SSD Setup « DesertMac's Blog — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 07:29:52 +0000

[...] I didn’t need this and I needed all the space I could get from my new drive. So I used this article to find and delete the [...]

By: Disable Wake From Sleep When Opening the Lid of a MacBook Pro

Disable Wake From Sleep When Opening the Lid of a MacBook Pro — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 18:30:23 +0000

[...] 1 next to it indicates that feature is enabled, a 0 is disabled. The ‘hibernatefile’ or sleepimage is where the contents of your Mac are kept when you sleep the machine, this serves as a cache file [...]