Hi Peter:

Thanks for your post. Here are a few other practices that have helped me at my observatory:

1) Keep a logbook, and log every change that I make. This has been very helpful. Sometimes a very innocent change can cause a problem a week later. In a recent case I updated by SBIG driver and broke my system so that I could only connect one camera at a time. (It was a bug in the new driver.) So having all of the changes documented narrows down the list of what can be causing a problem. I also try to document solutions to problems so that I don't have to recreate them a year later.

2) Make one big change at a time. For example, I would test a SkyX Daily Build before trying to upgrade SkyX, FocusMax and ACP on the same day.

3) Keep hard drive backups. (Peter, as I understand your observatory you run dual computers). I have a hard drive set up to create an incremental backup twice a week during the daytime at 9:30 a.m. Approximately once per month I create an "Image Backup" of the whole drive. This came in handy a few months ago when I fried the motherboard on my CPU. I was able to slip the hard drive out of the computer, purchase an identical computer on ebay for about $250 (because it's a year old machine it was very cheap), slide the old drive back in and bring EVERYTHING up without having to reinstall ANYTHING. Amazing! That worked so well that I purchased another identical machine on ebay (I waited for a deal and got one for less than $200 because I was no longer desperate) and routinely install an image backup in it so that I always maintain a spare computer. This can protect you from a ton of badness.

I've always dreaded dealing with two problems: having my observatory go bad and having my shutter pulley fail. Both happened in the past six months, and the recovery wasn't as bad as I thought.

If folks are not backing up their observatory computer, my advice is to go out today and buy a backup drive and just make it happen.

All best,

Rob