preferred UPS for desktop computer
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The reason I'm asking is yesterday a customer lost 4 hours of transactions (that 4 people were putting in) in quickbooks when the power went out unexpectedly. There isn't a way for them to save often.
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They asked about backup power so it wouldn't happen again. I don't want to recommend UPSs that don't do their job, but I have never used small ones like that so I don't know what people have had good luck with.
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@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
The reason I'm asking is yesterday a customer lost 4 hours of transactions (that 4 people were putting in) in quickbooks when the power went out unexpectedly. There isn't a way for them to save often.
The root of the problem here, of course, is QuickBooks. Do you realize that this means that QB was caching database transactions for FOUR HOURS! WTF
There is no way anyone can claim that this is okay to use in a business use case. That's unthinkable. Four seconds without flushing to disk, sure. Four hours, there's no excuse for QB making that or anyone buying it and acting like it was a legitimate recommendation. It should be saving EVERY transaction as it happens. This isn't 1980, we know how to make databases.
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@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
They asked about backup power so it wouldn't happen again. I don't want to recommend UPSs that don't do their job, but I have never used small ones like that so I don't know what people have had good luck with.
Most anything works for a desktop. But this is really a critical server. You want to step things up a bit.
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@scottalanmiller I totally agree with you. QuickBooks is way behind the times and I hate supporting it. Can you recommend something for a manufacturing company that is better designed, is easy to use, has support, and will either export to QuickBooks or be easy for their accountant to use? They also have some we plug ins for their web sales ( I think woo commerce IIRC) and another program that prints shipping labels. This is for a company with about 5 people that would use the system at a time.
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@scottalanmiller said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
Most anything works for a desktop. But this is really a critical server. You want to step things up a bit.
The server UPS stayed up. It was the desktops that all rebooted when the power dropped for a second.
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A moderate sized Eaton probably makes sense. You have to think of this machine as being an accounting server with a storage malfunction that has to be worked around. You'll have issues if drives fail, power supplies die and similar.
Sixteen lost hours of labour is not trivial to lose. And likely takes quite a bit more than sixteen hours to put in again as they have to figure out exactly what was missing, what is corrupt, etc.
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@scottalanmiller said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
A moderate sized Eaton probably makes sense. You have to think of this machine as being an accounting server with a storage malfunction that has to be worked around. You'll have issues if drives fail, power supplies die and similar.
Sixteen lost hours of labour is not trivial to lose. And likely takes quite a bit more than sixteen hours to put in again as they have to figure out exactly what was missing, what is corrupt, etc.
Well the kicker is we lost time using tools like the QuickBooks file Dr to try to repair the file from when it got corrupt - but we were able to get it so we could open the quickbooks file from the time it went down. They printed out all the invoices that were generated after the time of the known good backup. Then we moved the corrupt file aside, put the file in place from the known good backup and they re-entered all the transactions from the hard copies.
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@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@scottalanmiller said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
A moderate sized Eaton probably makes sense. You have to think of this machine as being an accounting server with a storage malfunction that has to be worked around. You'll have issues if drives fail, power supplies die and similar.
Sixteen lost hours of labour is not trivial to lose. And likely takes quite a bit more than sixteen hours to put in again as they have to figure out exactly what was missing, what is corrupt, etc.
Well the kicker is we lost time using tools like the QuickBooks file Dr to try to repair the file from when it got corrupt - but we were able to get it so we could open the quickbooks file from the time it went down. They printed out all the invoices that were generated after the time of the known good backup. Then we moved the corrupt file aside, put the file in place from the known good backup and they re-entered all the transactions from the hard copies.
Ah, so it wasn't that it didn't save them, it was that it was corrupted because it was holding the file open when the power went out? that's at least more acceptable.
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@scottalanmiller said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
Ah, so it wasn't that it didn't save them, it was that it was corrupted because it was holding the file open when the power went out? that's at least more acceptable.
yes, At first it wouldn't open. Then we ran the file dr and it would open, but there was some odd stuff like a customer had two entries, with old transactions tied to one entry and one new transaction tied to another entry. A few of the basic reports wouldn't even run.
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By the way, I just found out that @CraigElliott has been the CEO of Xero, one of QB's key competitors.
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@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@scottalanmiller said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
Ah, so it wasn't that it didn't save them, it was that it was corrupted because it was holding the file open when the power went out? that's at least more acceptable.
yes, At first it wouldn't open. Then we ran the file dr and it would open, but there was some odd stuff like a customer had two entries, with old transactions tied to one entry and one new transaction tied to another entry. A few of the basic reports wouldn't even run.
Oh... financial data that isn't accurate. Good job QB.
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Like data back ups, a ups is only as good as the last successful run time test.
Batteries do fail, so of course plan to check and monitor them -
I have nine ups units, nearly half aren't monitored,... I need to work up the rPi project ....
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@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@scottalanmiller I totally agree with you. QuickBooks is way behind the times and I hate supporting it. Can you recommend something for a manufacturing company that is better designed, is easy to use, has support, and will either export to QuickBooks or be easy for their accountant to use? They also have some we plug ins for their web sales ( I think woo commerce IIRC) and another program that prints shipping labels. This is for a company with about 5 people that would use the system at a time.
Is it worse than supporting Sage?
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@EddieJennings said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@scottalanmiller I totally agree with you. QuickBooks is way behind the times and I hate supporting it. Can you recommend something for a manufacturing company that is better designed, is easy to use, has support, and will either export to QuickBooks or be easy for their accountant to use? They also have some we plug ins for their web sales ( I think woo commerce IIRC) and another program that prints shipping labels. This is for a company with about 5 people that would use the system at a time.
Is it worse than supporting Sage?
Yes
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I have a few APC 750's dotted around and they work fine. They do come with USB connection for computer shut down but we don't use them, we just inform the user if the building power goes off SAVE and shutdown.
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Avoid APC Back-ups models like the plague. We have had 2 of them fail to provide juice even after batteries were changed. I use a Tripp Lite at home and have never had an issue
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@EddieJennings said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
Is it worse than supporting Sage?
I only have one client with Sage and I probably have 10 running QuickBooks so I wouldn't consider that a fair sample size, but I haven't had nearly the problems with Sage that I have with QuickBooks.
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@EddieJennings said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@Mike-Davis said in preferred UPS for desktop computer:
@scottalanmiller I totally agree with you. QuickBooks is way behind the times and I hate supporting it. Can you recommend something for a manufacturing company that is better designed, is easy to use, has support, and will either export to QuickBooks or be easy for their accountant to use? They also have some we plug ins for their web sales ( I think woo commerce IIRC) and another program that prints shipping labels. This is for a company with about 5 people that would use the system at a time.
Is it worse than supporting Sage?
Yes but Sage isn't a picnic either. The non-profit I used to work at used both.
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For our desktops, we use these: https://www.cyberpowersystems.com/product/ups/cp685avr/
