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JeffWA
 
 
 
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    February 19, 2010
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JeffWA's Reviews
 
Peace of mind from the world's most trusted UPS.The Back-UPS battery backup offers guaranteed power and surge protection for wireless networks, computers, gaming consoles and other electronics in your home or business. Models supply battery backup during outages and unsafe voltage fluctuations, as well as provide protection from damaging surges and spikes. They're available in 'tower' or 'floor' styles, and together with a variety of standard features, they are the perfect choice to protect your data and keep you connected.
 
Customer Rating
3 out of 5
3
Lacking in Mac compatibility
on February 19, 2010
Posted by: JeffWA
from WA
I have an early-2008 Mac Pro and I recently suffered a power outage while Time Machine was doing a backup to an internal disk, and as a result my backup disk got irreparably corrupted. So my purpose for getting a UPS is to be able to gracefully shutdown in the event of a power outage. APC’s web site made it sound easy... OS-X 10.5+ have built in support for USB UPS’s... it just works! Not quite. It only appears to work until tested further.
When I plugged the USB into my Mac I was initially quite impressed that the UPS controls immediately showed up in the Energy Saver preferences. I was a little disappointed that some of the functionality was lacking, such as the remaining run time, but I could live with that since the percentage of batter left seemed accurate.
Next I began simulating events by pulling the UPS plug out of the wall. Next issue was the Mac Pro’s power supply buzzed on battery power. This is because these non-Smart UPS’s simulate the AC waveform in low-resolution steps. I didn’t want to pay twice as much for a true since wave, so this was just another annoyance I could live with. However, I’ve read that some newer power supplies don’t work at all with the stepped output, so be sure to do your own research on that.
Next I timed a shutdown in the middle of a Time Machine backup to make sure it was graceful. It wasn’t graceful. OS-X does a hard shutdown and my backup disk got irreparably corrupted again. I verified this repeatedly on both Leopard and Snow Leopard. This was upsetting since this was the whole point of the UPS. This isn’t a problem with the UPS, though, so not ready to return it yet, and began researching software alternatives.
However, in my repeated testing I find another major issue. OS-X and UPS stop communicating after only a couple events (1-4). Rebooting the computer or unplugging and replugging the USB cable gets it going again. Since most power events would probably result in the computer being restarted anyway, this issue could go unnoticed in practice. However, if folks have brown-outs or outages under a few minutes then this could again defeat one of the main reasons to have a UPS.
In trying to determine if this was an Apple problem or an APC problem, I connected the UPS to a Windows XP machine I have and installed the PowerChute software. Verdict: it’s an Apple problem. I simulated over a dozen events on the Windows machine and it kept going like a champ. The PowerChute software also reports all the status information accurately and seems to work really well. For the first time ever I was a bit envious of the PC.
But that didn’t last long because I found some better software for the Mac... apcupsd. This is not for the faint of heart as it’s a complicated unix program designed for IT pros. However, there’s a nice binary installation package for OS-X on the www.apcupsd.com website and it works pretty well right out of the box. It has a GUI agent that has all the status info reported by the UPS (a lot more than even PowerChute had). To make modifications to the settings, such as when to shutdown you have to edit a text file as root. This means you have to be familiar with sudo and vi commands. You can also customize what happens on any of a large number of events by editing files with names equal to the event. I modified each one to send mail to my Blackberry. I also made a simple modification to unmount my backup disks when going on battery. I did this, because even though apcupsd does a graceful shutdown command, Time Machine still created some minor corruption. Although the corruption was easily reparable with Disk Utility, I felt this still wasn’t good enough, and Time Machine does seem robust against disk unmounts/ejects in the middle of a backup. I also verified that apcupds never lost communication with UPS over many simulated events and time. And if it did lose communication, there’s an event for that, so it will send me mail, and not just silently ignore the UPS like OS-X.
I should mention I also investigated a piece of software called PowerSaveUPS. It’s pretty full-featured and very nice, including 2-level shutdown (graceful, then emergency). However, 1) it’s expensive, and 2) it still had the same communication problem as OS-X.
So now I am pretty happy with this UPS since I can do everything I want to do, and don't think there is anything better for the money. And even though the 2 main gripes I had with it seem to be OS-X and Time Machine faults, I’m still deducting stars from APC for claiming Mac compatibility when in reality it was extremely difficult to get it set up to be as reliable and graceful as it ought to be. I think they have a responsibility to put more effort on that.
On another note, this UPS has a feature where it will cut power to some sockets based on the current draw of a master socket. The idea is when your computer is asleep it will cut power to peripherals. This sounds nice in theory, and is how they get away with slapping a big sticker on that says it will save you $150/yr in energy costs. However, in practice it doesn't make much sense to plug much in there. I can't plug my monitor there because these sockets are not battery backed, so I wouldn't be able to see to close my files in an outage. I also don't want to put my printer there, because when my office computer is sleeping, we still may want to print over wifi from laptops. In the end, then only thing I found I could put there is my powered speakers. And I don't think that's going to save me anywhere near $150/yr.
For your reference, my 8-core Mac Pro with 30” monitor draws 320W at idle, as such this UPS supplies 17 min. of backup power.
What's great about it: Good features and control, Good power, Pretty
What's not so great: Poor Lack of Mac compatibility, master controlled sockets won't save much money in practice
I would recommend this to a friend!
Features
3 out of 5
3
+17points
17of 17voted this as helpful.
 
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