In the event that the campus is requested to reduce power consumption, you should power your computer off if you are not planning to use it within 15 minutes. If the situation arises that you feel that power may be lost to campus, you should gracefully shut down and power off your system to reduce the likelihood that your equipment may be damaged.

In the event of a loss of power on campus, your PC and/or MAC equipment will immediately shut down. Any work that was in progress will be lost up to the time the file was last saved or an automatic backup was done by the program (if your program has this feature available and enabled). Hardware malfunctions such as hard drive corruption or failure, monitor failure, or processor failure are possible as a result of a sudden loss of power. Surge protector power strips will not prevent your equipment from being damaged in the event of a sudden loss of power.

If you are active during times when power loss may occur, you should save your work frequently. In addition, you should not leave your computer unattended with active files open. If a power loss does occur, turn your computer equipment off. Do not turn your computer back on until power is restored and stabilized in your area for at least ten minutes. This ten minute delay is also needed to ensure that all network servers in the Computer Center have been powered up, rebooted, and are operating properly before you attempt to restart your computer. When you are ready to restart, power on your equipment and check carefully that the system boots properly. Then check any work that you were doing and attempt to recover from any problems as needed. If your computer fails to connect to its network service, please power off your equipment, wait ten minutes, and retry. If you are still unsuccessful, please contact the Computer Center to determine if the problems are related to failure of your equipment or some other network hardware.

Campus network servers and mainframe equipment are configured with battery backup power which will last about 15 minutes in the event of a power loss. If a power loss occurs in the Computer Center, our staff will immediately send a network broadcast message ("Computer Center has lost power. All servers will be shutdown in two minutes"). This means that a power failure has occurred in the Computer Center area. If you receive this message, you should immediately save your work, exit your applications, and shut down your computer. The Computer Center staff will wait two minutes to see if power is restored. If power is not restored after this two minute interval, GBIT staff will begin to shut down and power off all network servers before the battery backup power supply is exhausted. If you are still attached to the servers, you will not be warned that the shutdown is occurring and your connections and sessions will be terminated. Corruption of your files can occur if you do not shut down your system gracefully before the network servers are shut down.

If the power outage is throughout campus, you will not be able to receive the broadcast warning message as your equipment will already have failed. However, you will receive the message if the power outage is only in the Computer Center area. Regardless of where the power outage is, if you receive the power outage broadcast message, you should immediately start your shut down activities as all network servers will be shut down and powered off starting in two minutes.

Once power has been restored and stabilized in the Computer Center, all network servers will be restarted and tested to ensure they are operating properly. If the outage has been throughout campus, the Computer Center area will have power restored first to enable the network servers to be restarted and tested before users attempt to restart their computers.

If your hard drive is severely corrupted or fails due to the power loss, it may have to be replaced and/or rebuilt.