Power Outages

[King Cobra]

Pardon my profane family language, but I am so Greg Fredding Dan Pauled right now.

In just a few hours so far today there have been two Fredding power outages with my computer on, and it shuts down, obviously.

How is the computer affected by this, performance, operations, chances of Fredding up on you, etc.

I want this to be a discussion, not a Q&A thingy.

 

[edesignuk]

We went through a period of having constant power cuts, I hate to think what it could do/has done to all my machines when power is cut like that

 

[shadowfax0]

I left my computer on for my trip to Iceland (2 weeks) and as soon as I got into my room, BOOM! power outage. Hadn't been one for two weeks Anyhow, all I can say is run fsck -y because the drive's head skipped on the surface, and fsck -y fixes any little errors in the directory. Cheers!

 

[alex_ant]

I love it when the power goes out and everything in the room shuts off and grinds to a halt except my notebook.

The only way a power outage could harm your computer is if the hard drive is in the middle of a write when power is cut, or if the outage is preceded by a spike or surge. The former is fairly likely. HFS+ is not known for its robustness or integrity, so if you don't have a UPS, make regular backups. The performance of an HFS+ volume won't decrease, but all the data on it might vanish.

(Also, if you're burning a CD-R, that will be ruined, obviously.)

 

[King Cobra]

I ran the fsck -y after each one today, so far...

But I'm saying will there be any sort of performance decrease even after you fix the errors? Or do you just lose unsaved data?

 

[DeKa]

It was reasons like that that the first thing I bought after my Australian $4395 17" iMac was an APC BackUPS power supply for $165 Australian. It runs for about 10 mins +/- and automagically shuts down the iMac if I'm not here, before the battery runs down.

That'd only be about what, $60 or $70 US so it'd be a good purchase for everyone I think!

Derek

 

[shadowfax0]

...I don't think there'd be any performance decrease, I do it on a somewhat regular basis, and haven't noticed anything go awry, performance or otherwise. Cheers!