Re: House Power Failures and Mac
- From: shamino@xxxxxxxxxx (David C.)
- Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 16:41:09 GMT
Dudley Henriques <dhenriques@xxxxxxx> writes:
I let it sleep all night usually and it's here I'm worried about a
power failure and what that might do to the Mac.
Obviously I could purchase a battery power supply backup system but
that's a fairly large expense for a home user.
Have you actually gone shopping for a UPS? They're not all very
expensive. You don't need hours of run-time, just enough battery to let
the Mac perform an automatic shut-down.
Most UPSs sold these days let you attach them to your computer with a
USB cable. Mac OS automatically detects this an adds a new page to the
"Energy Saver" preference pane, where you can configure the on-battery
behavior, including one to perform a shutdown when the UPS's battery
starts to run low.
Can you let me in on how some of you deal with this issue?
I have a UPS. I bought a big one (an APC SmartUPS 1000 with a spare
battery pack) so I can keep working for 90 minutes before the battery
runs out, but you obviously don't need one that big if you just want to
protect your equipment.
One thing I'd like to know is how my Mac would suffer or not suffer in
the event of a house power failure. My PC with Windows was a mess when
this happened (twice) but so far I've been lucky with the IMac.
Assuming you have journaling turned on for your HFS+ volumes (you can
turn it on from Disk Utility, if it's not already on), then the file
system damage will be minimal, or maybe even non-existant. Journaling
is designed to protect against that.
It will not, of course, protect you from data that apps haven't yet
written to disk.
If I do get nailed, what's the prospect for damage and are there built
in utilities in my OSX that I can run after a failure to help restore
things back to normal?
If your file system gets damaged, Alsoft's Disk Warrior has a good
reputation. It helped me once when something made a disk volume
unreadable.
You should be making regular backups, however. Even if a power failure
doesn't destroy your disk, other things still can. They can wear out,
malware or software bugs can corrupt data, etc. When this happens (and
I mean when - it's always just a matter of time), your only solution
will be to restore your data from a recent backup.
Apple's Time Machine (part of Mac OS 10.5) is a fairly good solution.
Periodically making backups to off-line media (tape, DVD, or a hard
drive that isn't normally attached to the computer) is even better.
How do you other home users deal with this?????
UPS, plus weekly hard-drive backups of the whole system, plus monthly
tape backups of the system for off-site storage. (I keep the most
recent tape at work, in case something should happen to my home.)
-- David
.
- References:
- House Power Failures and Mac
- From: Dudley Henriques
- House Power Failures and Mac
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