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Currently I have an external hdd connected to my Mac Mini and (as a temporary measure) we are backing this up to Dropbox using a Symbolic Link. This works fine but the main problem is when the connection seems to drop between Mac OSX and the HDD. The HDD isn't in sleep mode as everyone else in our office is occasionally using it 8 hours a day, but it seems to drop throughout the day.

What I need to do is setup some sort of connection refresh to keep this connection alive. Any ideas anyone?

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Hmm, I will try this. Thanks for the suggestion. – ing0 Sep 1 '11 at 9:30
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I put that as a more detailed answer. – slhck Sep 1 '11 at 9:38
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  1. You could set up a cron job that touches a file on the external disk every hour.

    touch /Volumes/external-disk/file

    Just crontab -e and add this cron job according to the cron syntax (or see another guide here). touch will only change the time stamp of the file and should not cause any overhead or load.

  2. You could use the OS X power management to prevent the disk from ever spinning down again:

    sudo pmset -a disksleep 0

    Find out more about pmset with man pmset or this short guide.

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