After living through the power outages of late, I bought a UPS.

[Stinky The Clown]

Our Macs seem much more tolerant of a hard, abrupt shutdown than I have observed with PCs. That said, work can lost. In my case, after being down for nearly a week, I spent several hours trying to reconstruct the last hour or so of the work that I lost.

I was at Costco yesterday and saw they had an 810 watt UPS for what i thought was a VERY reasonable $89. I bought it. I connected it to my MacPro. I stared everything up. Voila! It all worked.

There was a disk with it that was PC only. Turns out that our Macs are UPS-aware. Connect the UPS back to the Mac via a USB cable at they communicate. Nothing to do but set your shutdown preferences and that's that. Easy-Peasy. It took longer to unpack the UPS and find a place for it than to get it connected and running.

I love my Macs!

[hamerfan]

1. Smart move

Good for you!
A UPS is very cheap insurance. And it is easy through the energy saver preference to set it up correctly. APC brand doesn't talk well with Macs, so it won't shut it down during a power outage, but it will keep it alive long enough for you to shut it down manually.
810 volt-amps is plenty! My iMac used about 240 watts, which is equivalent to 475 VA. I have the 750 and keep my iMac and external drive connected to the battery side. Other peripherals are connected to the surge protector side.
FYI, never connect a laser printer to the battery side of a UPS. They will drain the batteries quickly.

[Stinky The Clown]

2. Thanks!

My partner has had an APC for her Mac Pro for as long time. She told me about the inability to shut it down. Apart from that, as you say, it can save your bacon when you're able to shut down normally.

I connected my MacPro, an external CD/DVD drive I use on the Windows side under Parallels, and my 1 TB LaCie drive. I think I also want to connect my FIOS router so I don't lose Internet. A lot of my work is in the cloud, so It would be good to have that saved normally after a power outage, too.

As to the laser printer, I use it heavily . . . . not! Almost everything we do is PDF, so the laser just sits there. No need to connect it. Besides, it is in another room.