We had our second power outage in 48 hours this morning, and apparently now my Linksys Gigabit switch no longer works.
Admittedly it was kind of old, and ultimately I know that I should just be grateful that none of the actual computers got fried, but it still sucks because my home network felt just a little bit cooler because I actually had two PCs that could talk at 125 MBps with each other!
Anyways, I wish I had some extra money this week because unfortunately it’s something like this that tends to serve as a grim reminder for me that really bad things could happen when my computers aren’t properly setup. Part of it is that whenever I look at Uninterrupted Power Supplies, they do always tend to be pretty expensive – a good one is over $100 and realistically I need two to cover both my desktop PC and my home server. I’d love to be able to splurge and pop for one of the super-beefy, rack-mountable ones that could support everything by itself, but that’s not really very realistic when I don’t have a rack to actually put it in (maybe my next house will have a data center!) and the price tag is a bit higher, too.
It’s funny – for a short while I somehow ended up on APC’s mailing list and I would get fliers in the mail from time to time reminding me of all the other uses for UPS’ around your house as well! Which initially doesn’t seem like it would be much, but we’ve got two pretty big fishtanks that have filters running in them 24×7 that could use it. They may not need to run all the time, but being down for an extended period of time would be bad, not to mention if they’re not primed properly when the power comes back on to just resume pumping water, I can easily see one burning up trying.
But trying to stay focused on computers … whatever it is, I desperately need to finally act on this and do something soon because Florida just has way too many power outages during the summertime because of all the thunderstorms for me to lose my PC altogether on account of me not wanting to spend $150 on a fail-safe!
I also still need to get a backup solution lined up once and for all – something that covers both localized as well as online redundancy. Of course, that also costs money, but maybe we can try to fish it out of the couch cushions somewhere and make July officially backup and secure your home computers month here in the Sevener household!
Somebody please hold me to that – it seriously needs to finally happen here sooner than later…