I done my fair share of this. It certainly helps to bring a toolkit along, some canned air, my own laptop, a flash drive, an external drive with a variety of .iso files and some blank CD/DVDs. That way I can deal with most anything.
Leaving everything set to automatically update seems to keep things reasonably safe for most people I've helped. But there is a lot of dust in Colorado so blowing things out helps a lot too.
Doing a yearly backup is often better then no backup at all.
