14 Jul
2024
14 Jul
'24
6:02 p.m.
[quote]
If you or anybody else could recommend some good UPS for backups of my
machines, that would be a great help. I used to have one back in the days of
desktop computers (and I do still have a desktop, in storage), but now with
laptops and tablets and smartphones trying to take over the world, the power
backup solutions are getting hard to find. Or maybe things are just changing
too fast, and I am too old and slow to catch on.
[/quote]
(Again on tablet. Pixel running GrapheneOS in case anyone is interested.)
In my experience the best UPS devices are heavy, because they contain good old lead-acid
batteries. A hint is that the specs say the battery can be replaced. (Which I have done.
It's easy.)
It varies, but around here the nature of power failures is frequently a very quick glitch.
Sometimes numerous glitches, on and off 20 times in very rapid succession. So my primary
goal has been to shield against that, with the secondary objective of allowing for orderly
shutdown when the power goes out for some time. This does not require a UPS the size of a
refrigerator. I do not plan on using the computers off the UPS except for those purposes
and for keeping them running until I can get the generator started.
There is software that is supposed to monitor the computer and UPS and perform an orderly
shutdown once the battery is drained to a certain level. I have tried this and have not
found it reliable. The Linux versions seem to be poorly tested afterthoughts.
The ones I got this year for the TV projects are, as Amazon describes them, "APC UPS
Battery Backup & Surge Protector, 600VA Backup Battery Power Supply, BE600M1 Back-UPS
with USB Charging Port." Cost $80. The beeping can be turned off -- no power is
irritating enough; no need to have a beep designed to annoy going off every few seconds.
dep
Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album
Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/
-------- Original Message --------
On 7/14/24 12:45, William Morder via tde-users <users(a)trinitydesktop.org> wrote:
On Saturday 13 July 2024 13:41:35 dep via tde-users wrote:
Am on a tablet running ProtonMail, so I can't
readily bottom post. But I
saw that this involves SSDs, and thought it worth mentioning that SSDs are
notorious for failing as a result of blackouts. If you look around you will
find the exact mechanism; it usually involves the power dying while a write
is underway.
It happened to me this spring during my RPi build-a-television project.
Brand new 1tb SSD, literally just out of the box and checked. Was copying
Debian install from the SD card to SSD. Power merely glitched, maybe a
second. That was all it took. SSD was stone dead. Fortunately, Crucial
replaced it. And I got small UPSes for every machine that has an SSD.
They're pretty delicate. And their failure modes are non-obvious. I spent
several days trying to resurrect mine before giving up.
dep
Yeah, and not just SSDs. I had a regular old spinning hard drive that got
killed like that, although it was a more severe case. I was copying files
from one hard drive to another for backup, and the power went out. Two birds
were killed with one stone.
I lost everything, all that data, including 40 years of field research, only
some of which I have in hard copy (and those hard copies are buried away in
files in storage).
If you or anybody else could recommend some good UPS for backups of my
machines, that would be a great help. I used to have one back in the days of
desktop computers (and I do still have a desktop, in storage), but now with
laptops and tablets and smartphones trying to take over the world, the power
backup solutions are getting hard to find. Or maybe things are just changing
too fast, and I am too old and slow to catch on.
Bill
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