Time machine backups fail on new Toshiba drive

I did not develop this solution on my own. I found it in the Apple discussion forums, specifically this thread. Here are the details.

I purchased a new external drive, the Toshiba Canivo Basics 1.5TB model number  HDTB115XK3BA at Best Buy. I then follow the directions here to copy my old backup to the new drive. I went to back it up after the transfer and it immediately failed. The transfer had completed while I was at work so it had been 6+ hours since the transfer completed. That was plenty of time for the new hard drive to go to sleep. Turns out this is a habit of Toshiba drives from what I've been reading. I unchecked the option Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible in System Preferences/Engergy Saver and rebooted but that didn't fix the problem. I then came across a post about creating a crontab job to touch a file every minute to keep the drive away. Brilliant. So I now have the following crontab job that runs as the user I log in with every day.

* * * * * touch /Volumes/BackupDisk/test.txt

So far that seems to have done the trick.

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