How to protect my BeagleBone Black from unpredictable 5V electric power interruption?

I’ve heard about it if occur power interruption then my BBB is damage at once. Is it really necessary only UPS or supercapacitor for this?

I personally haven’t witnessed any damage to hardware. The ext4 file system, however, can become corrupt if the power loss occurs at an unfortunate moment. I’ve seen that happen 6-7 times on this year on some 10-s of devices which get their power disconnected every day.

So far I’ve implemented following software workarounds:

  1. Add nodelalloc as mount option. This should reduce probability of FS corruption according to http://www.pointsoftware.ch/en/4-ext4-vs-ext3-filesystem-and-why-delayed-allocation-is-bad/

  2. Add “fsck.mode=force fsck.repair=yes” to the kernel boot arguments. This will enforce FS checks on every boot and fix any problems found.

I have no evidence on the effectiveness of workaround nr 1, but nr 2 seems to alleviate the problem significantly. I’ve had no dead devices since.