The Practical Guide To Mac Security: Part 16, Uninterruptible Power Supply

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's Part 16 of my course The Practical Guide to Mac Security. This is brought to you thanks to my great Patreon supporters. To join us go to MacMost.com/patreon. 

Let's talk about one of the best tools that you can get for security for your Mac. It's not what you would typically think of as security because it's not protecting you from malware or scams. But it will protect you from something that's far more likely to cause a problem. A power outage. So to get something to protect you from that you're looking for an Uninterruptible Power Supply also called a UPS. So here's a look at what a UPS will look like. Here's one from a company called APC. Here's another one from a company called Tripp Lite and another one from a company called CyberPower. Those are the big brands. You're going to see lots of those if you do a search on a site like Amazon for a UPS. You can see they are all devices that basically can sit under your desk and there are boxes that house a battery. The front looks like this and usually has a readout to tell you how the battery is doing and the back looks like this. It looks kind of like a power strip. This will replace any power strip that you've got. If you already have a power strip under your desk to plug your iMac or MacMini into, this will replace it and it does the same function except it will also have a battery in it so if the power goes out you will have some time to shutdown your computer or maybe continue working if the power outage is short enough using that battery. 

Notice the back here two sides. They all work like this. There's a battery backup and a side that is basically not battery backup. So if power goes out then the battery will continue to provide power to anything plugged into the battery backup side but not the other side. So if you have say a MacMini and a screen and a printer on your desk you would typically plug the MacMini, the screen into the battery backup but the printer might be plugged into the other side. So the printer would go off during a power outage and the computer and screen would remain on so that you could continue to use them.

So an uninterruptible power supply does several things for you. First, and mainly, it gives you time to shutdown your Mac if there is a power failure. So the battery isn't going to last forever. The more things you have plugged into it the more power you're using depending upon what you're doing with your Mac the shorter the amount of time you're going to have. It could be as short as just a few minutes. But a few minutes is all you need to gracefully shutdown your Mac. So the difference is that if you lose power, even for a second, your Mac flashes off. Anything you were in the middle of doing is interrupted. If your Mac happened to be saving a file at the time that happened it could actually corrupt the file. So you could be in a lot of trouble. But if you have a few minutes and you see the lights have gone out you could Save, Quit your apps, Shutdown your Mac. If you live in an area where you typically get large power outages that last for a long time then you can just run through this and know that everything is fine and safe and you are protected now that you've shut everything down and you could wait out the power outage. 

Also, I'll show you how uninterrupted power supply's can do this automatically. So if you're even not sitting at your desk and this happens it can actually trigger your Mac to gracefully shutdown. If you live in an area where there are short outages, sometimes as short as a second you know when the lights blink off and then on again, or maybe you just get power outages that last 30 seconds or a minute here and there then you can ride those out using a good UPS. Continue to work with your Mac during that time and if the lights come back on then you can continue as if nothing happened. Also if you're using the power strip as a surge protector a UPS will take its place. A UPS is typically a very good surge protector so things that are plugged into it aren't going to be damaged by power surges if you're in an area where you get those.

So when you get a UPS typically it comes with some software. Typically that software is useless for Mac users. This is very confusing because you get the software and it will claim to do all these extra things and then you'll see that the disk that comes with it or the download URL, it's all for Windows. You'll be disappointed thinking, well I wish I could do those things with my Mac but this only works for Windows. It only seems to be compatible with Windows. But here's the thing. One of the reasons that you don't get the software for the Mac is because it's already built into macOS. You don't need to do anything extra or install anything. So, for instance, I have connected using the cable, the UPS I have, to my Mac. It just connects into the USB port on my Mac. Now if I look in System Preferences and go to Energy Saver I have a Power side, which was there before, but I also have a UPS side. This only appears when I've connected a UPS to my Mac. So until the point where I actually plug it into the back of my Mac this wasn't even here. Also at the top here I get this status. You can see here there's a checkbox. Turn it On and Off. This actually looks a lot like what you would see if you had a MacBook that had a battery in it. You would see this kind of thing. It tells you you're using significant energy and it gives you the battery amount. But this is for the UPS. 

In this System Preferences area you can set it to turn the display off after a certain period of time. If the UPS has been engaged you can set Shutdown Options here. So you can have the computer shutdown if the UPS battery is in use. So you can say, okay if the UPS has been activated because I've lost power after five minutes automatically shutdown. You can also have it shutdown when there's a remaining amount of time left on the battery or when the battery is below a certain percentage. The things you see here are going to change depending upon what your UPS can do. So if you buy a different model than what I have you may see different settings here and here. But this is basically the equivalent to what you would see  if you would install that software on a Windows machine. You just don't need to do that on a Mac. It's built into macOS.

So when shopping for a UPS you want to look for the battery size. So you can see this particular model comes with different battery sizes and the actual shape and features will change a little bit as well. But the larger the battery the more time you're going to have. Typically this isn't a big problem but if you are in an area where you get power outages all the time and its critical that you keep working you're going to want to get the biggest battery you can. If you don't mind shutting down pretty much immediately if there is a rare power outage in your area, then you can go with a much smaller battery. All of them have different variations on the battery sizes that you can get. So you just basically want to spend the amount of money that's appropriate for your use. You could find UPS's for as little as say $50 if you really just wanted something very basic and simple. They can go up to several hundred dollars if you want a real pro model, something that may work with say a MacPro that's going to use a lot of power and several screens and things like that. So you're going to buy based on battery size and the brand. Reviews are all over the place for each one of these. You'll always find a few people that have problems with every single brand. There's no perfect one. I've had every single brand at one point or another and I've had problems here and there. But it's way better to have one than not. So another thing to note is that sometimes the batteries can be removed from these. There's a way to get into them and remove them and replace the battery. The battery won't last forever. They will eventually wear out. It's great if you can have one where you can replace the battery rather than replacing the entire unit.

So this is pretty straight forward. If you want to go to your local electronic store and buy one you can get one there. You can find one online and order it. You should definitely get one if you have an iMac, a MacMini, or a MacPro. However if you have a MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air then it's really not necessary because your Mac already has a battery built into it and it's using a power adapter that's not directly hooked into AC power so it's not as necessary to have a surge protector either. So typically if you're just using a MacBook as opposed to an iMac it's not a problem.