Sounds like these guys studied your facilities for some time before hitting you.

They clearly knew exactly how what little security system you had worked. They knew your power systems were unprotected and how to access and then defeat them in order to bring the whole system down.

To me, I would be less concerned about sensing the main transformer lines being cut and be working on having a new power system installed that has all the wiring encased in proper steel conduit plus a security to power supply interlock that detects when the power is out and the backup power has failed to take over as well. Plus on top of that having a security system and alarms that can function for some time on its own internal power and alert law enforcement even if every line to and from the property is cut.

Lastly, I would be having all this done by a professional security company and not be looking at cheap homemade DIY setups, unless of course you don't really value your stuff enough to spend the money to properly protect it with a real professionally designed and installed system. Then by all means, feel free to take free advice from hobbyists on a forum on how to build critical components for s DIY security system and hope like hell it just maybe works next time.

Or not. I have no idea what you gross value of what you lost plus damages was worth or what it cost to replace it but hey that's not my problem.

Given your questions here and overall lack of proper up-front explanations to what you have and everything else I have strong reason to believe you really didn't lose much or at least don't value it or its replacement gear to any serious degree to warrant using proper protection let alone having ever backed up any of your critical data and software off-site.

 

having ever backed up any of your critical data and software off-site.

Something everybody knows they should do but very few actually do it.

 

Something everybody knows they should do but very few actually do it.

Yea I lost a hard drive years ago with loads of irreplaceable pictures and other things and learned my basic lesson.

Ever since anything I consider to be of any value is backed up on multiple hard drives in multiple computers plus a few hard drives that are not kept in the house as well.

As of now I keep master drives as backups for everything so should one die or get corrupted it's just a matter of popping it out and either replacing it or wiping it and reinstalling everything as a clone from the master backup drive.

It also makes for a good use of the older hard drives I took out of my computers when I put in newer larger ones.
20 - 40 Gig may not hold much for movies and music but it's more than enough to hold a fully loaded master.

I got hit with the ransomware thing a few months ago on both my primary laptops but all that required was an hour to pop out the drives wipe them and reload from their masters. No important losses and a good excuse to give them a major cleaning anyways.