For academic scientists, it's not always up to us. Just going out and renting a generator and hooking that up to our instrumentation ourselves may be technically possible (plus or minus various building code and safety issues), but by that time the damage is probably already done, so backup power really needs to be formally installed. We can beg the facilities and maintenance dept to install proper backup power, but unless we managed to get that written into our startup budget at the time of hiring, the money is probably not going to appear.