Question: Over the years, I've had to throw away a quite a few bits of computing equipment (and the like):

* Several ADSL routers with odd symptoms (losing wireless connections, losing wired connections, DHCP failures, DNS symptoms etc)
* Two PVRs spontaneously rebooting and corrupting themselves (despite the best efforts of the community to diagnose and help)
* One external hard disk still *claiming* to function, but corrupting data
* One hard disk as part of a NAS raid array "going bad" (as far as the NAS was concerned)

(This is in addition to various laptops and printers dying in ways unrelated to this question.)

Obviously it'll be impossible to tell for sure from such a small amount of information, but might these be related to power issues? I don't currently have a UPS for any of this equipment. Everything on surge-protected gang sockets, but there's nothing to smooth a power cut.

Is home UPS really viable and useful? I know there are some reasonably cheap UPSes on the market, but I don't know how useful they really are. I'm not interested in keeping my home network actually *running* during a power cut, but I'd like it to power down a bit more gracefully if the current situation is putting my hardware in jeopardy.

Answer: 
I didn't consider buying one, as in many years I haven't experienced any power outage. Until on day a thunder storm took out the PSU of my PC and the PSU of the console.
I have been using one for over 4 years now (batteries should be up for replacement soon, so knock on wood that there's no outage).

It has saved my bacon at least once, during an unexpected power outage. I was able to save everything and shut down without a hitch. I should mention that I live next to a switching station in my area (which happens to power the rail yard for our light rail system on our side of town). The switching station had "caught fire" and as a result, power was out everywhere for 10 blocks in all directions, along with the rail yard next to it. Preceding the event was a brown-out that lasted for several minutes. Eventually the fire was subdued (a mineral oil tank was the cause of the blaze) and service was restored.

My computer would have been reduced to so much expensive junk during that wonderful brownout. It would be one thing to be inconvenienced by losing some games or something, but it's another when you make your living with it.

"Personal" UPS units lack many of the bells and whistles of the big ones, but they *get the job done*.