Best UPS for a Home Server
The best UPS units to protect your home server and NAS from power cuts, with safe automatic shutdown.
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A UPS prevents data corruption from sudden power loss and lets your server shut down cleanly. Choose one with enough runtime for a graceful shutdown and USB monitoring supported by NUT. The goal of a home-server UPS usually isn't to keep running through a long outage — it's to bridge brief flickers and give the server a few minutes to shut down safely when the power stays off. That protects against the real danger: a filesystem or database being corrupted mid-write. A ZFS pool losing power during a write, or a NAS abruptly cutting out, is exactly what a UPS guards against. Most single mini-PC-plus-NAS setups are well served by a 600–900 VA line-interactive unit. The most important feature is USB (or network) monitoring supported by Network UPS Tools (NUT) or your NAS OS, so the server automatically initiates a clean shutdown when the battery gets low. Buy a model with a user-replaceable battery, since batteries wear out every few years and replacing them is far cheaper than a new unit.
APC Back-UPS
- Reliable line-interactive
- USB monitoring
- Replaceable battery
Well supported by NUT for automatic, clean shutdowns of your NAS.
CyberPower CP series
- Good runtime for the price
- LCD models available
- USB data port
A strong-value alternative with solid runtime and monitoring.