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: 
Where I work we have had issues with sudden power cuts and because some of our developers run virtual machines off of external hard drives, a UPS is a must. I can highly recommend the [APC Back-UPS ES 700](http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=BE700-FR) (which I believe I found [via Scott Hanselman's blog](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VistaBOOTMGRIsMissingAndTheImportanceOfTheUPS.aspx)). We have a few at work and I also have a couple at home. 

They come with 8 sockets total, with 4 being battery backed. It also comes with a socket to plug your phone line into and you can connect to it via USB, so it can detect for power failures and perform an automatic shut down. Although I must admit the software is ropey.
I used to run a media server without a UPS and was always a bit nervous of power failures. So I stumped up the cash and bought a cheap UPS, I installed that software which would perform an auto shutdown when the power went out for more than a few minutes. My mind was put at rest.

But, more importantly all of the odd problems I'd get, random crashes and reboots just stopped. Now that may be down to me having fairly cheap components in the server back then (I've done a number of upgrades / new servers since), but the cleaner smoother power coming in to the server certainly helped IMO.

I now have my 2 servers, 2 network switches, router PC and TV signal distribution amp all running from my much beefier UPS. The last time I tested it I got 40 minutes runtime before it got down to one light (but that was with one server). Anyway, the net effect of all that is that if the power goes down for 20-30 minutes my TV recordings aren't interrupted. The server performs TV/media duties. Unless of course the local TV transmitter also has no power (but I'd hope they'd have some kind of backup too).

I keep meaning to find myself another cheap UPS to run my home cinema projector from. I'm not entirely sure how my £200 lamp will behave being suddenly shut off and now cooling fan to bring the temperature down gradually. So, if a UPS were installed, I could just power the projector down and the UPS would effectively run the cooling fan until the temperature of the lamp dropped.