Is UPS worthwhile for non-production equipment? [closed]

Short answer, yes.

Long answer, read this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000632.html

You might want to distinguish between filtered power and uninterrupted power. Uninterrupted power is probably a good idea for things that you want to shutdown gracefully. Depending on your needs you might only need enough time for the shutdown to finish, resulting in a much cheaper UPS. Other devices may not need UPS at all, but only filtered power. Typically, it's the line spike that takes out power supplies and electronics, not the sudden absence of power -- it has to handle the switch being turned off in any event, which may be indistinguishable from pulling the power plug.

In my server room (back in the day), I had all my servers and disk drives hooked up to a UPS -- and a mighty big one at that. Printers, terminals (which could be moved to the UPS in an emergency), and other stuff that didn't need to up for the system to shutdown nicely, were on filtered power. Generally, I'd buy high quality filtered power strips (rack-mounted) for this purpose. Cheap power filters probably aren't worth the price.

I haven't priced UPSes recently. Depending on the price difference between the UPS and the hiqh quality filtering power strip, you might want to get the UPS anyway. Just be sure that the UPS is always filtering the power and won't let the spike happen, then try to pick up before the equipment notices that the power is gone. If it's truly important you want an inline UPS rather than a stand-by UPS, but you'll pay extra for it.

I've had a lot of problems in the past from power outages destroying equipment that was on surge protection. Now I consider UPS devices to be essential. In this day and age, there is no reason why I should have to suffer without power. All computers in my house are on UPS, as well as all network equipment. The lights and appliances may be off, but I'm still downloading from the Internet.

I just took mine out of the circuit because after 4 or 5 years, its "self test" function started failing every Monday at 1am. I'm probably going to buy new batteries for it and put it back, because every few months there is a little power glitch that crashes other electronics in the house but my home server keeps on chugging away.

Yes! And not just for computers. My TiVo, cable modem, router, and Xbox are all on a UPS.