The weather outside is getting hotter, and all those lovely air conditioners are sucking the power right out of my computers… It happens every year.

So far this year, it happened twice… within 24 hours. I learned long ago to live by the words "save early, save often," but losing 10-30 minutes of work is still 10-30 minutes of work.

At my last job, I had a UPS on my workstation. It was the same one the servers were plugged into, a side effect of having them directly behind my desk.

However, since last summer, I've been working from home and no longer have that benefit. I didn’t' have the money last year to go out and buy a big enough UPS to sustain me, so I lived with it. I probably lost power a dozen or so times in 12 months. Very annoying.

This year, I'd had enough (and happened to have the money in my pocket at the time), so I went out and bought one after the second time. I ended up buying a GeekSquad brand UPS from Best Buy (which is really a CyberPower UPS with a different cover on it) because I didn't have quite enough on me to buy the equivalent unit from APC (a brand I know and love, at least on it's higher end products). We'll see how it does. I haven't had another outage to test it on, but it didn't seem to mind too much when I unplugged it to clean behind my desk earlier today.