I know this has been suggested before, but I had a chat with Technical Support this morning, and they suggested I post my request here as well.
There’s been some discussion of having “storage space” associated with an online Rachio account to allow saving of configuration information. I have a different suggestion: I suggest a “download” and “upload” capability for configuration.
My thoughts:
Allow me to save configuration, which would download configuration to my computer. I can save as many configurations as I want under different filenames, back them up as I see fit, etc.
If needed, allow me to upload a configuration. If uploaded, then via the browser I’d specify the configuration file to upload, and said configuration would overwrite any existing configuration stored on my system.
This allows me maximum flexibility given a (hopefully) simple implementation.
Obviously, said feature should work with any generation of Rachio controller.
I’m not picky on the file format. Something humanly readable (JSON, XML, etc) would be nice. But since it’s primarily to allow me to save a configuration and restore it later, it’s most important that your WWW site understand the format for the restore operation.
Something that is humanly readable, though, would allow me to save the configuration in, say, a git repository, which would allow me to see what I changed over time. And that would be a nice extra. JSON is probably best, but I’m flexible.
did anything come of this request? I just had to replace (under warranty) one of my controllers. part of the troubleshooting was to remove my controller. Now it seems I have no way to “restore” the data other than reconfigure it all again. that’s like 4 hours of work…
Unless I replace or upgrade my controller, I’m not terribly concerned about this (although when - not if - things do go wrong, it would be very nice to have a backup). Last time I did this, I had upgraded my controller. This was painful enough (due to this issue) that I’ll think long and hard about upgrading the controller again. Without this feature, it’s not just a cost issue. Getting the new configuration reconfigured is a serious time investment …
I also would like to see this feature. But until it comes out, I keep my configuration in an excel spreadsheet – that spreadsheet was very helpful as I fine-tuned my settings as I would only change one thing at a time and then watch to see if I liked the changes (too many years as a computer person, I guess. I was taught, as well as learned the hard way, to only change one thing at a time and monitor before changing something else).
