{"id":3207,"date":"2010-05-05T08:32:22","date_gmt":"2010-05-05T07:32:22","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-04-12T23:38:24","modified_gmt":"2020-04-12T22:38:24","slug":"when-your-home-server-dies-a-ups-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/reviews\/when-your-home-server-dies-a-ups-review.html","title":{"rendered":"When Your Home Server Dies – a UPS Review"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"APC<\/div>\n

A few days ago we had a 27 minute power outage during a lightning storm near the Automated Home.\u00a0 Not an unusual occurrence in itself – but this one was to be more significant.\u00a0 After a few days of wailing and nashing of teeth here are the lessons learnt and why we now have an in-expensive but effective UPS on our server.<\/p>\n

Death of a Drive<\/strong> – Sometimes a power cut or surge will kill your PSU.\u00a0 However, on this occasion, trying to re-start our Jukebox WHS machine we realised it was the system drive that was toast.\u00a0 This was the only drive we’d re-used from the old server – perhaps foolishly – a rather elderly IDE drive. We were trying to save all the SATA bays for big data drives and use the IDE line for the boot disk.<\/p>\n

When we built our WHS box<\/a> last year we said this – “Backing up the WHS system drive seems to be the weak link in the current version [of Windows Home Server].\u00a0 From what we can see there’s no easy way to do this, bar having a separate RAID 1 system just for it.\u00a0 The partnership between the C: partition and the D: storage pool partition needs to be in sync, so imaging the OS drive with Acronis \/ Ghost or similar will be out of date and therefore useless shortly after it’s been done.\u00a0 However if the system disk does die you should be able to install a new version of WHS on a new disk which will then re-gain you access to your un-harmed data, albeit with the loss of any add-ins or other customisation to WHS you had.<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Lucky<\/strong> – And that turned out to be pretty accurate – our data did survive (phew), but there’s still considerable pain and down time involved in getting things back up and running again. The machine has to come out of the rack, lid off, dead drive swapped out for a new one.\u00a0 This is followed by hours of the OS reinstall (make sure you choose Server ‘Reinstall’ in a case like this – see the FAQ<\/a>).\u00a0 Then there are drivers to find, critical updates and reboots.\u00a0 As we said above, all customisation is lost too.\u00a0 Our server was backing up the most important files to an external USB drive using SyncBack, as well as a 30GB backup to the cloud using JungleDisk.com.\u00a0 These apps had to be re-installed and configured, plus our most important WHS addon – Disk Manager – had gone too, requiring more work.<\/p>\n

Add to this the disappointment factor when the rest of the household can’t access their video or music files for several days and you realise why \u00a360 spent on a UPS suddenly looks like very good value for money.<\/p>\n

Of course this part of the story has an air of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but we want to make sure this doesn’t happen to us (or you) again.<\/p>\n

\"APC<\/a>
\nAPC PowerChute – Click for full size version<\/p>\n

Never Again <\/strong>– We still imagined a UPS was an expensive beast – we were wrong.\u00a0 We looked around for a suitable model and chose the \u00a360 APC Back-UPS CS 350<\/a> after a recommendation.\u00a0 It’s a neat little unit, silent and with support for many OS’s including WHS.\u00a0 We like the way its battery is easily removed for replacement in the future too.<\/p>\n

Our server consumes around 100 Watts and the APC software predicts around 25 minute running time on its battery.\u00a0 In our experience that will keep it up during most power cuts – a good 90% of which are of the ‘flicker’ or the off for a second or two and then back on variety.\u00a0 Importantly it protects the server from power surges too.<\/p>\n

The UPS software runs on the server and communicates with the battery pack via USB (or serial).\u00a0 In the event of a longer power cut the software will initiate a controlled shut down or hibernation of the server before its battery runs flat – ensuring your data is safe from corruption.<\/p>\n

The unit has 4 x C14 IEC sockets on the rear.\u00a0 3 of them are battery supplied with a fourth offering surge protection alone.\u00a0 You can easily create an extension board in your Node Zero<\/a> supplied from one of the battery sockets.\u00a0 It’s easy to plug in your (relatively low powered) router, wireless access point, switch etc so your server and laptops could continue to access the internet during a power cut (providing the phone service remains up – as is often the case).\u00a0 The CS 350 also has an RJ-45 Modem\/DSL socket to protect your router from surges too.<\/p>\n

Play not Work<\/strong> – So gone are the days when a UPS was an expensive luxury or only found in business server rooms.\u00a0 Now there’s no excuse for not giving your data that extra layer of protection, and giving you peace of mind.\u00a0 Lets spend those hours and days watching our movies and listening to our music, rather than re-building servers!<\/p>\n

No products found.<\/p><\/p>\n

Available from Amazon<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0: \u00a0\u00a0WHS Server Failure FAQ<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0: \u00a0\u00a0Building Our DIY WHS <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago we had a 27 minute power outage during a lightning storm near the Automated Home.\u00a0 Not an unusual occurrence in itself…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2018-12-10T08:48:05Z","apple_news_api_id":"bfbdfa44-7f64-4c39-a728-8445692ca5db","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-04-12T22:38:28Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAg==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/Av736RH9kTDmnKIRFaSyl2w","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hardware","category-reviews"],"apple_news_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3207"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50071,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3207\/revisions\/50071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}