Power outage while DAW was running. No UPS. Let's discuss implications of such events.

Without a UPS, the biggest danger for your DAW is corrupt files, but usually only if you were actively recording at the time of the outage. The second-biggest danger is damage to your power supply. A distant third-most-likely is damage to motherboard, RAM and disk drives.
 
Simply losing power abruptly will not necessarily cause any of these bad things to occur. More likely, it's the surge that happens when the power comes back on that does the damage. So one simple measure you can practice is to quickly shut everything off and then wait a few minutes after the power returns before booting back up.
 
A small UPS is a very good investment. You can get a decent one for ~$200. It only needs to keep you running for a minute or so, long enough to complete disk writes so your audio files aren't corrupted if you were recording when the power went out. But you also need one with adequate capacity to power your video monitors (hard to shut down with no video) as well as your audio monitors (mainly to protect from surges that could damage them).
 
I have everything running through a UPS, and have done so for decades. If I lose power only the lights go out, and maybe a space heater if it's winter. Audio interface, synthesizers, speakers and computer stay on. Only for about 20 minutes, but that's all I need to avoid disaster.
 
UPSs usually include some kind of "power conditioning" too. I put that in quotes because there is no formal definition for what that phrase actually means, so vendors can stick in a 50-cent choke and a 10-cent varistor and call that "conditioned power". Taking out line noise isn't as important as surge suppression. ('Cause you've already got all your audio on a separate dedicated circuit, right? And all the ground wires are connected, and not daisy-chained?). A good surge suppressor is what will keep your power supply and motherboard from getting toasted, so make sure it's got a real suppressor that won't itself get blown up the first time lightning strikes nearby.
 
Another caveat for those of you who are smugly self-assured because you already have a UPS: they wear out. It's a good idea to test them once in a while by pulling the power plug and timing how long they continue to power your gear. You might be shocked that the battery that lasted 30 minutes when new now gives you 30 seconds.
 
(In a previous life, I was trained as a power-quality consultant for large computer rooms. It was seriously boring sh*t and involved crawling under floors and stuff, so after a year of it I went back to software development.)