The $90 UPS battery pack I thought was a rip off, turns out it paid for itself in one outage
I always figured those cheap desktop UPS units were a scam until our office in Portland lost power twice in one week last month. I grabbed a refurbished APC unit for $90 and it kept our file server running through both 20 minute outages, no corrupted data, no angry calls. People tell me to just use a surge protector and cloud backups, but that doesn't help when the NAS is mid-write. Has anyone else had a cheap UPS actually save their hide during a brownout, or am I just lucky?
Kept the server up because a UPS gives you actual battery time, not just surge protection, so it's doing way more than a power strip ever could. Just don't count on it covering a long outage if you're running a big load.