Personal UPS by APC

The Back-UPS CS 350 is a super product. You can get it at Staples (at least I got mine there awhile ago) or Amazon for about $80, which is a great price. Having units like this that are affordable and small is a huge boon for those of us running home servers for whatever reason --- for me it's both home (pictures and video) and business (books and client files).

If you're not familiar with them, a UPS is basically a big battery backup --- if your power goes out, it has enough juice to shut machines down cleanly rather than just dying (it comes with software so that happens automatically). But more importantly for me, it smooths over all of the brownouts we get at my house. We get these multiple times per week, and the cute little APC box just keeps things running along fine.

It will be nice when somebody figures out that people really do want an all-in-home home server, with shared storage, a print server, broadband router/firewall, and wireless access point all together. But things are getting better; you can assemble a good setup pretty easily using stuff like this APC UPS unit (and USB hard drives!).