Well the Eye-Fi cards promise to have a better solution for copying photos: these cards can transfer your digital snaps wirelessly. Yep – despite being the same size as a normal SD card, an Eye-Fi card can connect to your computer over a wifi network. Let’s take a closer look at the Eye-Fi Pro | X2 – their latest and greatest.

Getting started

You need to download special Eye-Fi software for the initial setup. You connect your Eye-Fi card to the supplied USB adapter and configure it to connect to your existing wireless network, or you can either have it create its own ad-hoc network for when you’re on the move.

Then, just pop the card into your camera and away you go.

How to use the Eye-Fi card

The Eye-Fi card works just like any other fast SD card. Pop it in your camera, take pictures (RAW or JPEG or both) and movies – that’s it.

Once your camera has been on a few seconds, the Eye-Fi card will power up its wireless feature and look for your existing network. Once connected, the special Eye-Fi software on your computer will copy the photos over the air onto your PC or Mac.

If you haven’t got a wireless network nearby, the card can alternatively create its own wireless network. You connect to this network (named something like “Eye-Fi 132456″) and then the copying magic starts.

Performance

Despite having pretty impressive wireless performance, it will take a bit longer to copy the huge files produced by today’s modern cameras over wifi than it would over a USB card reader. However, you can optionally choose to only copy your JPEG images, leaving your RAW copies on the card ready to by copied over USB later.

The software is an Adobe Air app, so it isn’t the best Mac app I’ve ever seen, but overall it isn’t too bad. Once you have your card configured, you won’t need to use it too much anyway. Kudos to Eye-Fi for having a cross-platform solution for us Mac users that works.

Other handy tricks

Geotagging

Certain Eye-Fi cards can also make use of the wireless chip inside to geo-tag your photos. They do this by looking at nearby wifi networks. These are later matched by the Eye-Fi software to a database that knows the geographical location of tonnes of wifi networks around the world and uses that to give your photos a rough geographical location.
It’s not perfect, but it’s usually good enough to help you figure out which side of town you took a particular photo.

Endless Memory

Need to take a ton of pictures? No problem! If you’re on a wifi network, your Eye-Fi card will shove pics over to your computer and free up storage for new pictures, which means you’ll never run out of storage. This is only useful for certain scenarios, but if you need to take a lot of pictures and don’t want to have to switch cards it might come in useful.

Picture uploads

I didn’t test this feature, but Eye-Fi also offers an online storage and sync option, that allows you to share pictures with friends or between devices.

iPad app

One other great feature is the fact that you can use the Eye-Fi card with the free companion iPad app, allowing you to use your iPad as a giant photo preview screen: snap a shot, wait 2 seconds and it shows up on the iPad. I used this feature to turn my iPad and a camera with an Eye-Fi card into a rudimentary homemade wedding photo booth.

Conclusion

If you just need to grab a few photos quickly, the Eye-Fi a great solution. I could see it being particularly useful in scenarios where you’re frequently taking a small number of shots and need to quickly preview them on a larger screen.

The geo-tagging feature is also quite nice and a good alternative to using geo-tagged iPhone pictures as a reference.

The Eye-Fi Pro | X2 does exactly what it claims. The wireless performance is pretty good and it can be a huge timesaver if you often need to preview your pictures in between shots.

Recommended

Here’s a few setups I’ve tried over the years that helped me stop worrying about backing up by automating the entire process.

Strategy 1: Just the basics

I used this system by itself for a while due to limited capacity on my external harddrive and still use it to keep an off-site backup of my most important files and documents. I don’t back up everything however, so bear in mind that this is a trade-off between storage-location security and capacity.

Basically I use Transmit and Automator to backup all some selected files to an FTP server. If you don’t have your own FTP server, you could also use a free dropbox or mozy account to do the same thing. Transmit installs a handy “synchronize folders” Automator action, so just select the folders you want to back up and save your automator workflow. Then you can use OS X’s built-in cron scheduler to automatically run your workflow to back up your files. (Edit: this guide (link) is helpful for setting things up!)

I usually back up my mail accounts, most of my application preferences, personal documents and files this way. Applications as well as my Photo, Music and Video libraries are not backed up though.

Pros: Offsite storage, access from multiple locations, no peripherals required.

Cons: The first sync could take quite a while, depending on the amount of data you’re backing up, although incremental backups after that are relatively fast. Longest restoration time as you’ll need to install a clean system and slowly rebuild your system piece by piece should your hard drive die. No backups of older versions of files.

Verdict: Ideally only used in combination with 2 or 3. Only rely solely on this strategy if you like reconfiguring your entire system or don’t have an external harddrive.

Strategy 2: Mirror your drive

This was my favorite strategy pre-Leopard. I used Shirt Pocket Software’s excellent SuperDuper! utility (Shareware, but offers a free mode that can also be used for this strategy – backups will take longer though) to create a complete copy of my harddrive on a partition of my external firewire drive (you can also use Carbon Copy Cloner, but I can’t attest to its reliability as I’ve never tried it). If a system update should break something, reverting to your previous settings is as simple as booting off the external drive and putting SuperDuper in “reverse gear”, copying your backup to your internal drive.

I set the external partition up to be the exact same size as my internal drive and ran SuperDuper 3 times a week. The best part about this strategy is that restoring the system is super fast and you can even boot off your backup drive and continue working should you need to.

Pros: Fastest “turnaround” time in case of a crash, fastest backing up, predictable backup size

Cons: No version control, requires an external harddrive, no off-site storage.

Verdict: Great alternative for Tiger users, or if you frequently like to switch hardware or test different OS versions.

Strategy 3: Backup everything, all the time

Of course, no article on backups would be complete without mentioning Time Machine, Apple’s system-level backup utility built-in to OS X Leopard.

Time Machine completely relegates backups to a background process that most users won’t even notice and allows you to really just forget about them. Time Machine will also back up multiple versions of files, allowing you to retrieve older copies of documents in case you’ve deleted something important. As it stands Time Machine is more or less an ideal solution for most users. Turnaround time is fairly fast, although you’ll need to copy your files back onto your internal drive before you can use the system, there’s no way to boot off a Time Machine drive.

Time Machine will consume a large amount of space on your external harddrive however, filling it entirely before it starts deleting older versions of files. One way to avoid this issue is to partition your drive, but as  harddrives have become so affordable, it’s probably worth investing in a dedicated large backup drive. Also, should you discover an issue with a system update, there’s no easy way to revert to your system’s previous state.

There are a few reasons you might want to go with Strategy 2 instead, (say you want to keep around an older OS installation on a spare backup drive to boot into, e.g. to test something under Tiger), but for a lot of users Time Machine will be the easiest backup strategy to go with.

Pros: Version control built-in, unobstusive, most extensive backups.

Cons: Backups aren’t bootable, there’s no built-in way to easily schedule backups for specifc times or intervalls, requires 10.5 Leopard, capacity intensive.

Verdict: Highest level of data retention, not quite as flexible or customizable as SuperDuper!

Conclusion
Personally I currently use a mix of strategies 1 and 3: Time Machine performs my main backups, but I use a  DropBox beta account for my most important “current” files and also backup my photos to my FTP server. Apple’s system updates also seem to be much more reliable and you very rarely hear complaints about a system update making something worse, so the lack of an easy “revert to previous system” with Time Machine is not so much of an issue.

Competing services such as Omnibox, Moxy etc. offer similar OS clients, but DropBox is the first that seems to match Apple’s own .Mac iDisk in terms of seamlessness: Your DropBox appears in the Finder and adding a file is as simple as drag and drop. A utility that runs in the background then uploads that to your DropBox account.

I’d even go a step further and say that it actually seems to work better than the iDisk. Adding files to your iDisk is a sluggish process that usually ends in a two second progress bar claiming your 200MB file has been uploaded in record speed, followed by 2 hours waiting for .Mac to “finish” the file.

The DropBox folder looks and feels like a regular local folder. The default behaviour is even “move” rather than “copy” when you drag items into it, which is a bit disconcerting at first. (Tip: Use option drag!)

Once you’ve dragged in a file, DropBox takes care of the rest silently in the background. Files are instantly visible online at your Dropbox account, even whilst they’re still being uploaded.

I’ll have a some more impressions later this week, but initially it does beg the question:

Why on earth doesn’t .Mac work this well? Apple already has OS integration baked in, so there’s almost no excuse for the current state of the .mac iDisk. For me at least, snappy, pretty DropBox – even in its current beta state – beats the pants off the iDisk in every respect.

Let’s hope the “.mac overhaul” the rumor-mill has promised for WWDC pans out.

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