The UK village where I live has what can best be described as a very flaky power supply -- I can expect a brown-out once a week, and a power cut maybe once a month. In the last-but-one power-cut, one of my two Buffalo Linkstation Mini NAS units died and has defied all resuscitation attempts. It has now been replaced and I'm intending to install a UPS to protect as much as possible of my home-office network.
The UPS I've investigated (APC BE700G-UK) will allow me to connect my PC, my monitor, one of my two Buffalo Linkstation Mini NAS units and my network switch to battery backup outlets; and my router, printer, other NAS and wireless broadband aerial to surge protection outlets. In the event of a power cut (which is very likely to outlast the NAS battery) the UPS would shut the PC down gracefully (via a USB conntection), but everything else would go down in an unmanaged fashion, either when the power failed or when the UPS battery failed some time later. If I'm in and awake, I can perform manual shutdowns but that won't always be the case.
There's an option in the APC UPS to slave the devices on battery protected circuits to the PC -- when the PC powers down, the slaved devices lose power -- but in normal operation that isn't useful when the NAS units are required to run in the absence of the PC (they serve music plus data to laptop PCs in the house).
Is there any configuration -- either with this NAS or another one -- that would allow me to shut the PC and both NAS units down gracefully in the event of a power cut, but allow the NAS units to continue running when the PC is powered off in normal operation?