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: 
You might want to distinguish between filtered power and uninterrupted power. Uninterrupted power is probably a good idea for things that you want to shutdown gracefully. Depending on your needs you might only need enough time for the shutdown to finish, resulting in a much cheaper UPS. Other devices may not need UPS at all, but only filtered power. Typically, it's the line spike that takes out power supplies and electronics, not the sudden absence of power -- it has to handle the switch being turned off in any event, which may be indistinguishable from pulling the power plug.

In my server room (back in the day), I had all my servers and disk drives hooked up to a UPS -- and a mighty big one at that. Printers, terminals (which could be moved to the UPS in an emergency), and other stuff that didn't need to up for the system to shutdown nicely, were on filtered power. Generally, I'd buy high quality filtered power strips (rack-mounted) for this purpose. Cheap power filters probably aren't worth the price.

I haven't priced UPSes recently. Depending on the price difference between the UPS and the hiqh quality filtering power strip, you might want to get the UPS anyway. Just be sure that the UPS is always filtering the power and won't let the spike happen, then try to pick up before the equipment notices that the power is gone. If it's truly important you want an i[nline UPS rather than a stand-by UPS](http://www.pcguide.com/ref/power/ext/ups/types.htm), but you'll pay extra for it.
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*.