Guest computer smarty and movie-hound Jasmin Chua writes:

I've been following your backup woes on your blog. Here's a tip for your readers: Try Mimeo 1.5 (www.tanagra.com). It's a program that monitors and backs up any folders and file types you specify. It can also save multiple versions of the same file to different devices—a hard drive, USB device, FTP server, or a Memeo Internet disk (remote storage space you can "rent".) It's free to try, but the full version costs $24.95.

Thanks, Jasmin! I wish I'd asked your advice earlier, for instance last week.

So I've taken to calling Apple for no particular reason. I always have a question, of course (like "Wh-what happened??"), but it's gratuitous. The conversations end up sounding a little like Minor Tweaks' yearning but fruitless courtship of Anna, the superficially caring, ultimately cold Ikea-bot. Am I confessing? Venting? Seeking solace? Just wanting to talk tech support, as though I still had a working iBook, the hardware equivalent of a phantom limb? Hard to say.

Today's remarkably kind (especially considering my semi-homicidal tone) Apple guy said that he's learned as a technician that every time you do anything at all, like a system update, any transfer of files, or new installation of any kind, you back up. Makes sense. Hubris. All the hubris is staggering. Hubris tends to do that, once you realize how false and loaded it was. False and loaded—I dated a guy like that once. He had a very flashy car. But back to the matter at hand: Won't you please, won't you please, please won't you do a backup? Thank you. It restores the order.

So you say you know all this? Old hand? Nothing new? I've been getting a lot of that. "Oh, gosh, I back up every day." "I have a fabulous external hard drive." "I have a supercomputer dating from the 1957 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Desk Set that does it all for me while I catnap and will eventually replace me and my silly files altogether." Well, if all of you to the last reader backed up every day, Apple (and IBM, let's not forget IBM, and Dell, and all those other brands I've never bothered to think about—I lived in Palo Alto in 1982 and I'm brand-loyal) wouldn't have a help line, would they? Y'all remind me of me in third grade, whose pre-TV-literacy conversations often went like this:

Kid: Hey, didja see Welcome Back Kotter last night?
Me: Oh, yeah.
Kid: Really? What was your favorite part?
Me: Um...what was yours?
Kid: The part where [insert Kotter-era detail here].
Me: Oh yeah, me too!

I'll buy that you back up every day, but only if you buy that I learned how to do the "nanu-nanu" fingers from TV and not from you five seconds ago.