We've got the power

Lori and I work from home some days. If we're both writing and have no testing to do, that is much more convenient than wasting half an hour driving to the lab and another half an hour driving back. Proof that both backups and a good UPS are necessary in even the smallest environment was driven home to us yet again on Friday - the hard way.At about 11 am, when the power went out to the house. Some genius with a post hole digger drilled right through the power lines, dropping power to six houses in the neighborhood.

Thanks to our small UPS we were able to get all of our servers down in an orderly manner, and our clients are all laptops so they went to battery power. We were down for seven hours while the power company dug up the line and replaced it.But had we not had a UPS, or had the UPS failed, things would have been ugly. We do have a backup server we built, and it keeps relatively recent backups (no replication at home yet :-)), but the work to restore everything would have been intense, and all that time our work and hobby access would have been down.Luckily we were prepared, and we were home to shut down everything on the UPS before it too died.