My normal 6.00 am blogging routine, which I’ll go into more detail about in a later post, was shattered this morning by the overnight storm which hit our area and took out the power. Thankfully there was no damage to the house, no Wizard Of Oz style flying buildings or anything like that, just a tremendous amount of noise and some bins dancing down the road. Although my trusty Powerbook was available our broadband connection was out from around two o’clock this morning until about twenty minutes ago when the house started to flicker back to life. I now have the nerve racking task of checking all my hard drives to make sure the sudden power cut didn’t upset them. I have backups all over the place but I’d rather not spend the whole day recovering files, especially since most of them are still sitting in the corner of a room, victims of my ruthless GTD collection weekend.
Keep your fingers crossed for me, hopefully nothing will be lost or damaged. Any suggestions for a backup power solution will be gratefully received. Although I already think the solution might be to power everything down and unplug the drives at the end of the day. It’s just too easy to hit the sleep button on the Mac and have it snooze overnight and then bounce back within seconds in the morning. Or not, as was the case today.








Do you have battery back-ups? I just bought one for my set-up so that if the power does go out suddenly the computer and all external drives powered through the battery back up don’t zip out suddenly.
It sounds like I’ve been taking my luck for granted. I have my computer scheduled to sleep at 12:00 every night; the only time I shut it down is when a software update forces it on me.
We’ve been having some strange weather recently (58°F in a Midwest January) and, what feels like, constant storms. The thought never crossed my mind to shut down the computer; fortunately, we never lost power. I do have surge protector, though. I realize it’s not a perfect solution, but it gives me some peace of mind. I think Deb’s suggestion is ideal; I’ll have to look into it myself.
Especially if the weather doesn’t change soon.