iMac Sonoma 14.1 -- Wake-up for Incremental Backup using Terminal command PMSET

Back in the day, a Mac user could easily set a "wake-up" time at Settings > Energy Saver. At some point, this feature of the GUI was removed -- it is no longer present in Sonoma.

When I started evaluating Acronis Protect Home Office, I quickly discovered that -- unlike other cloud-based archiving products - Acronis cannot wake an iMac (perhaps it's just my iMac) that is "sleeping." While I could have set "prevent automatic sleeping" to true and "put hard disks to sleep when possible" to false, I really didn't want to do this for just one program.

What others probably know, but I want to document for this forum, is the use of the UNIX "pmset" command that can be issued in Settings > Applications > Utilities > Terminal.

You can look up the pmset command in Wikipedia. I'm not allowed to place a hyperlink in this forum post.

In my case, I wanted to have an incremental backup every day at 23:00:00 (11:00 PM).

Therefore, the command I entered was:    sudo pmset repeat wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 22:59:00     that will wake the IMac each day at 22:59:00 -- one minute before the incremental backup's start. Note that the system level password is required (e.g. what you use when you log in).

To erase the command: sudo pmset repeat cancel   that you would need to enter if you decide to cancel or change the time of the incremental backup.

Now my Mac wakes up one minute before the incremental backup, completes the backup, and goes back to sleep on its own.