1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS's fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

The only real solution is to make this an extended maintenance task. The batteries are cheap so an alert every 4 years is likely sufficient to replace the battery before it dies. You could do it every 2 or 3 years instead at your discretion.

Chec out this article

If you're having frequent power outages, you might consider buying an UPS. Other than that, I'd just buy a new CMOS battery every few years. Mine seem to last way longer than 4 years. Maybe 8y or so.

What about all those fancy new laptops that are built like smartphone that can never be opened do they have CMOS batteries? Ive never thought if this till now.

From what I can see, I just need to replace the CMOS battery. But this computer has been running for over 4 years, so what is stopping this from happening again around 2028?

Replace the CMOS battery again.

Why you are at it you might want to check the battery in your smoke alarm. I think your are support to change the smoke alarm battery every 5 years.

I just do an uptime -p if I suspect there was a power outtage

If you're the owner of the website, I suggest you look into those php errors

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Here's the thing, you now know you've to replace the battery every 3 years or so, but I've SONY batteries running for 5 years and they're fine. Now, your motherboard's manufacturer is a piece of shit, the board should've just ignored the issue and proceeded to the OS. All modern operating systems sync the UEFI time whenever they get time from NTP so no need to halt the boot process.

Some BIOS manufacturers allow you to disable all halts on errors. As soon as you connect to the network your system should be able to sync its internal clock.

Honestly just replace the CMOS battery on a schedule if it's a big deal, a UPS is nice to have but it doesn't really solve that specific problem.

Can you replace the CMOS battery with a supercapacitor that is kept charged? This should not need to be replaced every 4 years, I think.

I wonder.... How about a hot swap cmos battery? Thinking you wire the cmos terminals to a few batteries in parallel Or 3 And add a voltage indicator for each of them

I agree with you about an uninterruptible power supply. While a computer’s Power supply can normally handle about half a second of the wrong voltage, a UPS should provide you with minutes to hours of run time. While that won’t solve the CMOS going bad, it would probably reduce the amount of times a power outage would last long enough to shut down the computer - though that absolutely depends on the reliability of power in your area.

Another option would be to look at different motherboard options. AsRock Rack (and I believe Supermicro) offer boards with BMCs, so you’d be able to change your BIOS settings from anywhere with a virtual KVM. They’re certainly pricier options, but a lovely convenience to have.