My BX750MI-GR has saved my precious data on two occasions. Earlier this year, my seven year old, well used waffle iron shorted, popping loudly and sparking quite brightly in the process, probably because of all the gunk that had accumulated inside its less cleanable interior over the years. That not only made my breaker trip, but also blew the 16 amp main fuse. The UPS kicked in immediately, making a klick and a beep, which felt amazing. That was my first time ever.
As for the second time, see this post.
You wouldn’t ask that question if you lived in an area with shitty power network. With daily brownouts, momentary power losses and voltage spikes your equipment will survive much less than it could. I had a router die because of that.
It’s impossible to measure this impact at home, but it’s there even on much more stable networks.
I have there UPSs.
Two at my desk: The smallest for my daily driver NUC, Eaton S3 850VA (510 W max) and enough for that purpose. The second is an Eaton Ellipse Pro 850 (510 W max) for my gaming PC. I want to replace both with a single device that has enough Oomph for both., but yet have to find a suitable model without fan noise at a reasonable price.
The largest is a APC SMT1000 that I got used without batteries, that I use in my rack for networking devices, some additional small devices, a Lenovo m920x and a custom build server (NAS, proxmox etc.). Usually the draw from the wall for that is 200 W. I added LiOn packs instead of the Pb ones, as they are much more durable: 10 years instead of 2 to 3 years. As LiOn packs have around 50 % continues load vs the Pb, the UPS ist purposefully oversized.
Where I live, we barely have outages, but they occasionally happen. Around once in two years. So it’s more a peace of mind. Hard to say, how often they in fact ‘saved’ anything.
no, and I am a bigger threat to my own equipment than the power having an unplanned outage
would have been 8 times this year but I dont have one
Damn … do you live in Ukraine?
I am considering getting one but power outages are pretty much unheard of, so it’s not really a priority. So far it would have saved me 0 times.
Pretty much same here. There was one time where street construction accidentally hit a cable, but considering how rare that is and how error resiliant most filesystems are nowadays, it’s just not worth it getting a UPS.
Where I live there’s constant brownouts and mini blackouts. Lights flickering, power going down for 0.5 seconds just long enough to cause a shutdown. It’s saved me from innumerable amounts of data loss and corruption. I was always terrified to move files or perform long disk operations, because of this. But now I have confidence that my computer won’t randomly fuck up. I even leave long running ffmpeg and other processing tasks overnight! It’s wonderful
I grew up in a place where home electricity wasn’t reliable and we got power outages several times a week. Portable UPS units like in the post were still pretty expensive back then and it was a luxury when we finally got one for our shared family computer. Our setup was basically power socket > AVR > UPS > PC.
I had one for my nas and lab. 0 times save and the maintenance (usually battery change ever or every second year) made me realize it’s not worth it.
So I use journalling Filesystem (as are many nowadays) which should cope with sudden stops. The next risk to minimize are surges/lightning so I bought a appropriate protection and also surge protected the dsl line (with proper grounding).
Anyhow, back to the question. 0 times. It really depends on where you live.
I have a couple cyberpower ups’s in my basement, one attached to my primary Linux server and the other to my NAS across the room, both are nut masters and the other docker nodes that also pull power from these units monitor via those main units. In the event of a power event my servers all drop out gracefully and then the NAS stops the disks. So far this has happened around 3 times for a full on outage, and there’s been maybe three times as many brown outs, my kids pc’s kick them out of games, but the rest of the infrastructure keeps on running with no interruption
my kids pc’s kick them out of games LMAO priorities. What if they were JUST about to deal the final blow to the last boss in a permadeath game? Anyway, sic setup! :)
Will a UPS provide any benefit on a non-grounded outlet?
I’m not an expert, but I don’t think grounding gives or takes anything in this scenario. Grounding in wall outlets provides a path for current to flow into instead of human flesh in case there is a shortcut in devices connected to the outlet, or if the outlet itself shorts. Please correct me if I’m wrong!
It’s saved my uptime probably dozens of times
Edit: is saved my hardware from damage probably zero times though
brownouts can stress electronics so they’ll eventually fail
But that is on the order of hundreds of brownouts. There are only specific regions that have regular brownouts. There it is definitely worth it.
Mine is there strictly to cover the fraction of a second it takes my solar to take over in the event of a mains flicker or loss… and it’s saved me from that dozens of times.
Its a bit of a “prove a negative” kind of situation no? You can’t know if the UPS saved anything if you dont have a control.
Complete tangent, but those small UPS’s can often be easily converted into an inverter for a car. Replace the battery with a cigarette plug, and you can plug it in to your car and get 240/120AC in your car. You might need to kill the buzzer, but otherwise its a pretty easy mod.
Let’s be fair, You always have to kill the buzzer. Like, it’s the first option I look for on a UPS. And I have ripped them out of lesser ones. I know the power is out, I don’t need a buzzer/beeper. And I’ve got the thing monitored with automatic shutdowns.
I used to have one and the buzzer scared the shit out of me in the middle of the night when I lost power. Reminds me of the old Avast! Notifications
Dang, if I ever get trapped somewhere, I hope you’re in there with me and that you brought your swiss army knife.
Can’t bring it anywhere, UPS is too heavy :D
They scream at you when they lose wall power. You know that they at least prevented a hard power off when that happens.
Yeah, but no guarantee that the hard power off would have caused data corruption, especially with a relatively idle server, which all of mine are most of the time :/
I had electric outage for 4 hours, nobody in my userbase saw the difference, but I never managed to make my debian detect the outage so I can get a mail about the fact that there is an outage (I’m not always home).
Btw if anyone here knows how detect them outages with ups plugged in with usb on my server it would be amazing !
Perhaps you could nut?
yes I already have it and everything is detected but I can’t manage to trigger a bash script for sending mail notification when ups state change, or ups outage event, etc (mail script works fine when simply triggered)
But thanks I found this page may be useful and more specifically this one, I’ll keep these comments updated if I did it ! ╰(▔∀▔)╯
Nice, you’re all over it!
APC have some instructions accompanying their products, but I didn’t want to “bloat” my system with their software, because I’m never far enough away from my equipment. I don’t have to rely on the UPS sending commands to the system. But, it’s absolutely doable!
Not having a UPS is like running through a cornfield with your junk hanging out.
There’s a chance a leaf or stalk will catch you just right and give you a gnarly paper cut on your genitals.
Why risk it?
Not all of us run through the cornfields. Some of us just stand in the middle of the scare for all to see our beautiful… Everything.
true story
I just seed from SSDs, so I would’ve been just fine without a UPS, but I want to keep everything running even if I make too many waffles.
Nothing would’ve prepared me for that beautiful analogy
