Know anyone who goes for days, weeks, or even months without syncing their iPhone—not to mention all their contacts, photos, and other data—with iTunes? I know I do.
Personally, I try to perform a full iPhone sync with iTunes at least two or three times a week, meaning I'd only lose a few days of content should anything befall my precious handset. And if you're a regular reader of gadget blogs like this one, chances are you do the same.
But for everyone I know who's conscientious about syncing their iPhones with iTunes, there seems to be one or two more who rarely, if ever, bother to sync.
My lovely wife, for example, literally goes months without syncing her iPhone 4; instead, she just downloads new podcasts and apps over Wi-Fi, and charges the handset with the AC dock in our living room. When her iPhone does get synced—once in a blue moon, mind you—I'm usually the one who ends up doing it.
Now comes SuperHero, a new, $70 iPhone dock from Iomega that's aimed directly at those carefree, reckless iPhone users who charge, but don't sync. (You know who you are.)
No, the SuperHero won't back up everything on an iPhone; no apps, music or videos, nor any e-mail or call logs, for example (although apps can be re-downloaded, as can purchased iTunes song with help from Apple's customer support team, while e-mail can typically be retrieved from a server). But the dock will save content that may be irreplaceable, such as contacts and—especially—the unsynced photos sitting in your iPhone's camera roll.
Here's how it works: first, take the standard iPhone charger dock that your iTunes-allergic friend or loved one uses each night and stealthily swap it out with the SuperHero. You'll also have to install the free Iomega SuperHero app onto the target iPhone, and insert the included 4GB SD memory card into the slot on the back of the dock.
When it's time for the first sync, just unlock the iPhone (the home screen should be visible) and plug it into the Iomega dock; once you do, the SuperHero app will automatically open and prompt you with first-time setup options (such as whether you want to rename your backup profile or encrypt your stored data).
Once you're all set, you tap the "Backup" button, and make no mistake—the initial backup can take anywhere from a few minutes to all night, depending on how many photos are on the iPhone's camera roll. In my tests, a 1MB photo file took about two minutes to back up, so if you've got a couple hundred photos to deal with, well … you could be looking at 6 or 7 hours. On the other hand, the SuperHero dusted off my collection of more than 600 contacts in about five minutes.
While the intial backup may require some patience, subsequent backups should be relatively speedy, since only new (and updated) contacts and photos need to be transferred onto the SuperHero's SD storage card.
And while you'll still have to make sure your iPhone is unlocked before you dock it to the SuperHero, you won't have to tap anything else to initiate the backup; instead, a pop-up window appears, giving you 30 seconds to cancel before the automatic backup begins.
So, let's say the worst happens: your iPhone gets damaged, lost, or stolen. Now what?
To test out the SuperHero, I backed up an old iPhone with plenty of contacts and photos before wiping it completely, taking it back to its factory settings. Then I re-installed the SuperHero app onto the empty iPhone and plugged it back into the dock (remembering to unlock it first, of course). Immediately, the SuperHero app launched, and I tapped the "Restore" button.
Next, I got a choice of three different backup profiles to restore (yes, you can back up multiple iPhones with a single SuperHero, so I went ahead and backed up two other handsets for testing purposes). The SuperHero automatically assigns an 8-digit alphanumeric ID to each iPhone it backs up, but the naming convention isn't exactly friendly; expect a garble of numbers and letters, and you can only rename a profile using a 10-digit numeric keypad. So your best bet is to write down the ID number for each backed-up iPhone before disaster strikes. (Another option would be to use separate SD cards for each handset.)
Once I picked the correct backup file, I tapped restore … and the process began. Again, expect a long wait if you've got more than a few dozen backed-up photos—but hey, at least they'll be alive and in one piece. The videos in my camera roll, however, were neither backed up nor restored.
Does the SuperHero dock make for a perfect backup solution? Obviously not. Is it better than never syncing at all? Certainly. Is it worth $70? That's up to you, of course. Personally, I don't need one. My wife, however, says she's sold.
Full disclosure: Iomega supplied me with a loaner SuperHero dock for testing purposes—and yes, I'll be sending it back.
— Ben Patterson is a technology blogger for Yahoo! News.
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