Power Protection and Data Backup
July 23rd, 2008It could happen to anyone and it happened to me.
A couple of weeks ago my little internal server PC refused to boot up. I had all of our office PCs backing up to its hard drive as well as some other important data so I took the hard drive out and put it in my workstation to retrieve the data off it and then my workstation wouldn’t boot up either. Hmmm…
It turns out both PCs (both connected to the same surge board incidentally) had blown motherboards. Not quite a total disaster and after just a day of mucking about later we were up and running again. Thankfully nothing was lost apart from a day’s work.
But it could have been much, much worse…
I started thinking about house fires and burglaries where the PCs might be lost forever. Insurance would cover the hardware but some of that data would be irreplaceable and could even mean the end of my business, so I needed a better backup solution for starters.
What I was doing was a good starting point where I have all the important data from all the office workstations backing up to a spare hard drive in a PC, but I needed to go one step further and have that copied to a 3rd source and that’s the beauty of the NAS (network attached storage) devices that many manufacturers now have on the market. These are basically enclosures with hard drives inside (hard drives are usually not included. Check manufacturer specifications for details and supported hard drives) that you can connect to a PC network. They show up on the network in “My Network Places” the same as a PC does so you can drag & drop files across or use a scheduled backup application like ezbackitup or windows backup. (I like ezbackitup because it only backs up files that have changed since last time, doesn’t compress and retains the same directory structure so it’s easy to find and retrieve single files).
A small NAS enclosure can be hidden or placed anywhere you like to make it an unlikely target for thieves and at the same time be easy to grab and chuck under your arm if you need to vacate the premises in a hurry. They start small & cheap to suit home and small business owners right up to rack mountable units with RAID and other options.
Click here to check out available NAS devices from my online shop.
The next problem was to deal with why those motherboards blew in the first place. We get quite a few surges in my house that we’ve never been able to get to the bottom of. (They tend to happen early in the mornings when everything’s turned off and no one’s even out of bed. Electricians are mystified). Since the surge protection board didn’t save them in this case the obvious solution was an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).
A UPS is basically a battery pack plugged into a power point to keep the battery charged, while any PCs or other devices plugged into it run off the battery power. If the power fails the PC keeps running for however long the battery can last and then will automatically shut the PC down safely before the battery is depleted. (There’s a serial or USB cable between the UPS & PC and software to facilitate this process). How long the battery lasts is dependant on the size of the battery and what you’ve got plugged into it. The cheaper ones tend to give a “clean” power supply to your PC and just enough battery power to automatically shut the PC down safely in the event of power failure.
I chose a Powerware 5110-1000A (currently selling for $237.60 at my online shop) which should give me 10 - 20 mins of power for my PC and 2 monitors in the event of a blackout but I’ve configured the software to shut me down after 5 minutes just to be on the safe side (which is generally heaps of time to make it outside to flick the circuit breaker back on anyway). It passed the first test with flying colours so was money well spent.
Choosing the right UPS for your situation can be confusing but Powerware have a great UPS Selector on their website to take out the guesswork. Click here to check it out.
Click here to check out the range and prices of UPSs from my online shop. I like Belkin and Powerware brands because they back their products up with connected equipment warranties and I get favourable feedback from my customers about them.
A couple of quirks worth mentioning with the installation of my shiny new Powerware 5110-1000A: The manual mentions removing the front cover to connect the battery lead prior to plugging it in. My cover was connected by a couple of screws which weren’t mentioned in the manual and my battery lead was already connected when I did get the cover off. A bit of unnecessary confusion there…
The other issue not explained was before installing the shutdown & monitoring software you need to install the UPS drivers. Without doing that first it won’t be able to detect the UPS so it can do its thing. I assumed the driver installation would be part of the same application but that wasn’t the case. It has to be done manually first.
All in all a valuable lesson learned from something that could happen to anyone any time. I strongly advise not to delay putting off doing something about this stuff.
Sort it out today!
