OS X Hibernate Modes
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Modified from the Deep Sleep v. 0.8 documentation.
Description and modification of the different hibernate modes
When the computer goes into sleeping mode, its behavior depends on a power management variable called hibernate mode. The hibernate mode can be set to different values:
- suspend to RAM only (old default)
- suspend to disk only
- suspend to RAM + disk (new default)
- secure vm: suspend to disk only
- secure vm: suspend to RAM + disk
Important note: You must use the right mode depending on whether you have "secure virtual memory" turned on in the security preference pane. Otherwise the suspend data will be corrupted.
In order to check what hibernate mode is currently active, the following command can be used in the Terminal application:
pmset -g | grep hibernatemode
In addition, users with administrator privileges can choose the hibernate mode. In order to do so, the following command can be used:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode N
with N replaced by the value of the hibernate mode to set.