A friend of a friend has a great system, if you've got lots of bucks to throw at a system and/or are really technical. He uses the Apple MacBook Pro and replaces the internal CD/DVD with a second hard drive which is slaved to the main drive so it automatically backs up the files. He also uses the built in Firewire 800 (ultra fast) port with a compact flash card reader built for that port and UDMA CF cards.
Apparently it downloads images from the cards stupidly fast and automatically backup on his machines (he has two MacBook Pros, of course.)
Not bad.
