When the apocalyptic lightning and rain storm blew through Lowell shortly after 1 pm today, the registry of deeds lost power for about 10 seconds. First the lights flickered but then they and everything else powered by electricity went out. It was only for the aforementioned 10 seconds, but that was long enough to shout everything down. Everything that is except for our recording terminals and scanners. You see, we work in a very old building in a neighborhood with sketchy electrical service so power outages, mostly of short duration, are not uncommon.
In response to past electrical outages, several years ago we obtained a dozen "uninterruptible power supplies" or UPS's, each sufficient to run a computer and associated peripherals. These UPS's don't provide power forever but they do give you a few minutes to finish what you're doing and shut down your machine gradually. This is important for us because in our recording process, nothing is saved until we complete all data entry. It is only then that we click "save" which causes the new data to be written to our database and recording information (book, page, time of recording) to be assigned. If we were near the end of the recording process but not yet at the "save" stage and we lost power, all would be lost and we'd have to begin anew.
Today when the power went down we stayed up and no data was lost. More importantly, no confusion was created about what had or had not made it on record. Afterwards I overheard someone say "I guess this is why have these UPS's."
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
To fully understand and appreciate the importance of uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), it is crucial to first understand how electricity is generated and distributed in whatever country around the world you happen to be. In many Westernised societies it is tightly controlled, regulated and fairly reliable but in other areas it is not and power protection at the final point of consumption, whether business or residential, needs to bare this in mind.
Computer Power Supplies
The power supply is a piece of equipment designed to protect your computer hardware from power fluctuations. It also allows you to save important data that you’re working on during a power outage, preventing data loss. This piece of equipment is especially important for large businesses and companies that make use of large amounts of data.
Post a Comment