These are my sleep settings…and Display is set to never turn off…
There is a problem with Sequoia and Time Machine in that it regular fails with a single folder/file. Once I’d excluded those in Time Machine, I stopped having the ‘disconnect overnight’ problem.
The three files I needed to exclude were:
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetItems
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.findmy.FindMyWidgetPeople
Go to System Preferences > General > Time Machine > Options, click on the + button and add these three times. Perhaps it will solve your problem too?
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How did you narrow it down to those files?
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Can’t remember exactly – but I think I followed advice similar to one in this Apple Exchange post: Why is Time Machine stuck on "Waiting to complete first backup" after upgrading to macOS Monterey? - Ask Different
log show --info --style compact --predicate '(subsystem == "com.apple.TimeMachine") && (eventMessage like[cd] "Failed * acquire device lock assertion*")' --last 24h
This gave me the list of files to exclude.
As I say, I can’t remember the exact process I followed, so check that post carefully to be sure you’re happy to run it first.
But that’s the command I ran (I’ve just checked my CLI history to make sure) and excluding the files it reported fixed the problem for me.
HTH
For those of you running your Minis headless, how do you deal with reboots? If I reboot my Mini server and leave it without logging in, it shuts down automatically after a few minutes and I haven’t found a way to disable that behaviour.
You’ll want to try and do authenticated restarts. It deals with FileVault for you and logs back in after restarting.
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The mini’s drive has two partitions. The boot partition does not use FileVault, so the login screen is accessible remotely. The system does not shut off. But since nothing private is on that partition, security is not needed. The second partition on the drive is encrypted, and contains private information. All external drives are also encrypted.
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That’s an interesting approach. I think that in my case it wouldn’t work for me, as I rely on iCloud Drive to back up my current work (I do my work in iCloud Drive space and it gets synced to my Mini server which then does a number of backups (clone, TimeMachine, Backblaze).
(I’m working under the assumption that moving /Users to another (even internal) volume is asking for trouble)
Interesting! This would solve the problem for planned reboots nicely 
I’d still have to deal with unplanned reboots but those happen very rarely. (I really miss having serial port console access a la Sun machines)
My server isn’t logged into iCloud. You wouldn’t ever move /Users, but would be moving the home directory to another volume. However I’ve noticed that iCloud does some pretty wonky things with the Documents and Desktop folders (they are no longer directly under the home directory with iCloud enabled) so this might be risky. I guess the bottom line is iCloud does some things to the directory structure that means best to leave things as factory standard as possible.
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I really should look into an alternative. Thanks so much for your replies