[deanhills]

Any suggestions for protecting electronic hardware from power outages?  Are you experiencing outages in your country?

In South Africa there is only one large corporation that provides electricity to the country.  This year among all other parastatal scandals they discovered massive corruption and wastage of funds at the electricity supply commission.  The most recent infrastructure that was being built and counted for the total electricity supply was faulty, because of bribery and corruption with using different suppliers to supply building materials, the specs didn't all fit, so the stations have to be continuously fixed, which means down time and loss of electricity supply.  Bottom line, of all months of the year, they all of a sudden decided in December to do load shedding.  Which means they work out a time table by which all of the regions in the country have down times for electricity at different times.  They said in the press it was due to start in December, but to our annoyance it started yesterday.  I'm not pleased, particularly since the area I live in has been hit with a time table right in prime time TV and computer use.  7:00 to 9:30 p.m. However I don't mind as long as I have advance warning so I can turn off my computer hardware ahead of the down time. Depending on the stage of load shedding, we have one down time slot for the day, and for phase 2, two. We're on phase 1 for now with 2.5 hours in one slot.

Anyway - bigger worry for me is the effect it has on my electronic equipment with unexpected down time when they are changing the phases with little warning - like they did on 30 November.  Are there other members like me who are living in communities with irregular supply, and what do you do to secure your equipment for unexpected power outages?

[xdude]

Where I live having a UPS (Uninterruptible power supply) is kind of mandatory for every Desktop computer. We don't have long power outages but sometimes it fluctuate whole day. This can be very bad for Hard drives which I know from personal experience. I'm using a UPS with dual batteries. It gives me enough time to sort out everything and shutdown the computer property if it's a power failure. Also it keeps the computer safe from those annoying fluctuates.

Here single batter UPS cost about 30 usd and dual battery one is about 50 usd.

[rudra]

i use a surge protector and a small live conversion ups [not backup ones that kick in]. that is mainly to protect myself from losing unsaved data and from surges. Here is a nugget of knowledge i gathered from real people in the business.

hard drives are not susceptible to power outages as they used to be. they have enough power in caps and system for safe head parking and that is mostly a mechanical procedure which kicks in automatically in modern hdds. so no chance of head crash anymore. you should be more worried about sudden jolts, drops etc.

For other electronics, surges are killers. high fluctuations. Not load shedding. they are simply like switching off.

[deanhills]

Thanks for the valuable tips @xdude and @rudra.  Good news to hear that hard disks of modern day are more resilient with outages and that load shedding has less of an effect than outage that is more sudden and due to a system fault.  This makes great sense @rudra as with the first load shedding event yesterday, my computer recovered much better than the previous outage that had happened because of a system fault.  That does make me feel much better already.  With the previous fault outage symptom was computer was extra slow - could hardly turn it on, and only way I could sort things out was to totally log out, shut it down, turn of the power supply and do the same with my WiFi power supply.  That more or less sorted it out then.  With the power shedding event in contrast, when I turned the computer on it went to the black screen in safe mode and Windows fixed itself (it hadn't done it before with the outages that had been as a result of a system fault).  

I have been looking at a UPS in a computer shop, but felt quite expensive.  The cheapest that allows for 30 extra minutes power down is 50 USD.  I've always used a surge protector for all of my desktop and TV electronics, but probably need to invest in a UPS.

[humanpuff69]

most hardware today have some sort of power outages protection but it still great having UPS . UPS not only give redundancy on power outage it also filter the electricity so if you live in place where the electricity is dirty and isnt stable ups can help

[rudra]

i forgot about some more things. here i wanna add them.

i always turn of caching on hdd. so my copy and moves are slightly slower, but less chance of corruption due to data loss. also, always copy and delete source. dont move. In linux, they use sync command to flush cache to disk.

good point about filtration there...but you need the kind of uos that supplies from battery even when there is power. naturally they are safer but more costly. But due to more usage, battery lasts for shorter periods of time. you need to change more often. buy i go to electronics market and know people who do repairing jobs. i buy from them and repair myself. comes very cheap. panasonic is a good battery brand. i forgot the name of the best japanese brand though.

dont buy the cheapest ups. buy the online type. and you dont beed 30 min backup. 5 to 10 works for me.

another trick is, attach a wifi router to direct power and set a ping from computer to wifi router ip. also set in script to sync the disk and shutdown when the wifi router is not available for (total backup time - time taken for shutdown) amount of time, that way system will auto shutdown safely even when you are not looking.

[Vuluts]

@deanhills The least and better way for power shortage is to use UPS as @xdude suggest it may take few hours or unless you got budget to buy a generator.

BTW UPS really used are to save and backup all your work while it has power, also to work on some task that are needed to be done in no longer hours.

[deanhills]

@deanhills The least and better way for power shortage is to use UPS as @xdude suggest it may take few hours or unless you got budget to buy a generator.

BTW UPS really used are to save and backup all your work while it has power, also to work on some task that are needed to be done in no longer hours.

This is probably wishful thinking, but would have been nice to have an external hardware device that would have enough power and design to do an automatic shut down of the computer when there is a power outage. Up and until the load shedding I used to keep my computer running day and night without shutting it down. I'd have liked to keep it that way and just have a device in my computer that has extra battery power when there is an outage and automatically shut down the computer for me. We're not always at our computer when there is an outage.

[chanalku91]

If You Have A Low Budget And Do Not Want To Move Buy Gasoline, Please Use An Uninterruptible Power Supply And Solar Panels, So That The Man Power Is Getting More Cost-Effective And Environmentally Friendly
Apart from that when the lights are off, immediately turn off your computer so that the data in it is not lost!
That's very important