[plug] Fax & Voicemail Random Thought...

[Craig Ringer]

> Survival of the computer, and especially of everything on the hard disk. I
> thought that would be obvious, from what I stated.
Well the disk can be taken care of by our friend the journalling file 
system. No disk for the last 10+ years has needed to be "parked" or 
otherwise protected from sudden power failures, the hardware will be fine.

The computer won't be damaged by power loss.

There is more concern about big surges etc - a decent PC PSU can take a 
_big_ spike with no more problems than a crash-halt of the system. This 
isn't something one relies on if possible, though. If a spike comes up 
your phone line ... bye bye magic smoke :-( still a decent surge 
protector can provide good (but not perfect) protection against power 
and phone line surges.

So really, there's no problem with leaving a PC on 24/7, and many have a 
BIOS option to auto-reboot on power loss too, so your machine comes 
straight back up after a power failure.

Of course for anything truly critical (hideously expensive, mission 
critical for work, or whatever) a proper UPS with battery pass-through 
and good power conditioning is a must.

-- 
Craig Ringer
GPG Key Fingerprint: AF1C ABFE 7E64 E9C8 FC27  C16E D3CE CDC0 0E93 380D
	-- if it ain't broke, add features 'till it is. (or:)
	while (! broken) { features ++ ; broken = isBroken(features) }