There’s one sure thing private industry and governments have in common: Both want to control the medium and the message when it comes to press coverage. This is understandable, and certainly the practice invites both friendly and sometimes contentious interactions between the fourth estate and the object of their coverage.

Apple’s way of manipulating media relations is almost legendary. By and large, they say absolutely nothing, unless they have a product, service, or successful event to announce. If something goes wrong, even if it’s a program defect that might, perchance, cause you to lose a whole lot of files, they are often dragged kicking and screaming into disclosing something about it.

This is most evident when it comes to the so-called Snow Leopard Guest account bug, which can result in the loss of your entire Users folder, amounting to perhaps tens of gigabytes of your precious data. Even though there were widespread reports about the problem, sometimes in Apple’s own support forums, only recently did Apple admit that it’s “investigating” the issue.

There are now published reports that a forthcoming 10.6.2 update will address that bug and other serious issues with Snow Leopard. But Apple won’t won’t confirm that fact until the fix is actually available for download.

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The conventional wisdom on both sides of the computing platform wars is that Microsoft Windows is basically a decent operating system that struggles but fails to match the Mac OS. Of course, you can’t ignore the prevalence of malware and the billions and billions of dollars Windows users have lost as a result of security issues.

You could also discuss rampant driver conflicts, and the draconian upgrade process to go from Windows XP to Windows 7. But these are problems that usually have solutions. In the first, you wait for Microsoft or a third-party company to deliver compatible software. For the second, buy a new PC. That’s what Microsoft wants you to do, because they’ll get far fewer phone calls from disgruntled buyers seeking help.

The real problem with Windows, however, is usability. That’s a subject that the PC-oriented reviewers at Consumer Reports magazine never dare touch. They don’t put people into little one-way glass rooms to see how they fare handling routine tasks, nor do they conduct surveys, so their reports about personal computers remain fatally flawed.

What’s strange about the particular shortcoming I’m about to discuss is that Apple solved the problem with the very first Mac in 1984, and Microsoft clearly isn’t paying attention, despite spending tens of billions of dollars to make Windows into a reasonably stable, productive operating system.

I’m talking about mouse tracking!

I can see where most of you are wondering what I’m talking about and it may well be that you don’t notice any such problem, one that has existed in every single version of Windows I’ve ever used. It doesn’t get any better, and fortunately it hasn’t gotten any worse. But why are the tech pundits ignoring this serious shortcoming? What about Apple when they create those Mac versus PC ads and online comparisons? It’s not there, and you wonder if maybe they’re afraid that Microsoft will wake up to the existence of the shortcoming and do something about it.

Indeed, I pretty much put this question in the back of my mind, until David Biedny reminded me of it during my interview with him for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE.

I’m even going so far to say that very few of you ever notice this problem. It’s not terribly obvious when you handle normal work on your Mac and PC, such as email, word processing, or building a spreadsheet. But when it comes to performing a task that requires precision movement of the mouse cursor, you will see what I’m talking about.

It doesn’t matter what tracking speed you set, what kind of device or driver you have as an input device. On the Mac, the motion is ultra smooth, and you can make the pixel by pixel alterations to 2D or 3D artwork with relative ease. On the PC, the mouse movement is erratic, and  precision is nonexistent. Sure, you can still get your content creation done on a Windows box, and the results you achieve may even be comparable to what you do on the Mac, but the work process is seldom as smooth or trouble free.

And, no, don’t remind me about the problems caused by a defective Mac or buggy software. I’m assuming all things are working as intended in making this comparison.

This Mac versus PC disparity may be a trivial matter, but it represents the sort of microcosm that defines the differences between the two platforms. Microsoft is all about producing the 80% or 85% solution, something that is almost as good as the product they struggle to imitate. They seldom equal the competitor, and even less frequently surpass the opposition.

When you bring any of this to their attention, the Microsoft executive, any executive, will basically deliver the same mantra. Yes, they know the current product isn’t terribly good, but not to worry. There will be an update in a year or two that’ll be far better. That would be fine if the competition stood still, but imitating a 2007 iPod touch in 2009 isn’t the answer to Microsoft’s woes with the Zune, and that’s only one of the products they still can’t excel at.

In a few days, Windows 7 will make its debut. They are even, believe it or not, scheduling house parties to honor the occasion, as if one truly wants to celebrate such a thing. Then again, that sort of promotional scheme comes from the same company that delivered those pathetic TV ads about nothing featuring 1990’s sitcom star Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. In fact, when I first heard about the Windows 7 parties, I got to thinking about the celebrations one might have in the 1950s, in the “Ozzie and Harriett” era. That sure ages me, but it also demonstrates just how out of touch Microsoft is to believe that such a lame marketing campaign is somehow going to make Windows 7 warm and fuzzy.

Yes, warm and fuzzy. Tell that to the people who want to upgrade from Windows XP and confront the need to backup their files, wipe the PC’s hard drive and reinstall everything. That’s sure something to celebrate, right?

Looking at the recent problems with the T-Mobile Sidekick smartphone and Microsoft’s Danger affiliate, it’s easy to forget that not all potential data loss problems can be blamed on the Dark Side of the computing universe. You see, Apple has had problems to contend with as well.

Consider a certain Mac OS X upgrade, where the partition map of some FireWire 800 drives became corrupted. To its credit, Apple rushed out its own update, and drive makers promptly issued firmware revisions. Indeed, I was actually bitten by this bug, which impacted Panther, or 10.3. I was selling an old Mac to a customer, and was backing up some of my old files before surrendering the computer to its new owner. That’s when it happened, and it was embarrassing, since that customer was witness to the chaos.

Yes, he understood the problem wasn’t one that impacted the computer, so that was that.

However, you had to wonder how Apple, which had heavily promoted FireWire 800 as an interface port, allowed that bug to surface in Panther. How could they not notice during the testing process?

More recently, a file system bug in the original Leopard release had the potential of damaging or destroying files moved, rather than copied, to another drive or network share. A rapid-fire 10.5.1 fix took care of that, but this wasn’t the end of the data loss syndrome, nor the beginning. In fact, some suggested that similar problems impacted earlier versions of Mac OS X, only it didn’t happen often enough for Apple to duplicate the defect and find a cause.

Now we have the insidious Guest account issue that affects Snow Leopard users. This is a serious one folks, and it apparently happens on occasion under a specific installation scenario. You create a Guest account under Leopard, and then perform a straight upgrade to Snow Leopard. Now if you open the Guest account, and then return to your regular user account, the latter’s data is zapped. Gone, history!

Apple’s support forums are crowded with similar tales of woe, but again it’s not something that appears to occur often enough for it to impact a large number of Mac users. That’s a good thing, but it also makes it doubly difficult for Apple to figure out what’s going wrong and devise a fix.

According to published reports, however, Apple is investigating the problem and they will hopefully have a fix in place soon, perhaps in time for the rumored 10.6.2 update.

In the meantime, there are fairly simple ways to get around the problem. An easy one is to just remove your Guest account before you upgrade to Snow Leopard, and create a new one when you actually need it after the installation is complete. In the meantime, take the added precaution of backing up your Users directory, so no possible variation of this data loss scenario can occur on your Mac. I’ve already weighed in about the need to have one or more regular backups of your stuff. You see, it’s not just this rare Mac OS X problem that might rear its ugly head. There are lots and lots of reasons why you might lose data, and I’m not going to repeat all the possibilities again.

Of course the larger issue is why these things aren’t caught by Apple during the testing cycle. Despite what one uninformed journalist for a major publication suggested recently, it’s not just specially selected journalists who get prerelease software from Apple. They keep an active developer program, known as ADC (for Apple Developer Connection), and anyone who subscribes to one of the paid packages is entitled to receive prerelease versions of the operating system, including both reference releases and maintenance updates.

In addition, Apple has a bug reporting system that allows the developers who test their products to report problems, and trace them from the original posting to testing and the final solution. But handling program bugs is more complicated than that. Any responsible software publisher is going to have to apply some sort of weighting system to a bug report. Something that has the potential of causing crashes or data loss will get first priority.

But that doesn’t guarantee a fix. You see, the conditions under which a bug manifests itself have to be duplicated in such a way that the problem can be reproduced over and over again, in a predictable fashion. Then there’s the natty issue of finding out what’s wrong and isolating a fix. Even if the fix is found and implemented, they have to make sure there are no side effects that might generate even worse problems.

As you might expect, all this testing and retesting takes time. Even a company as big as Apple can’t do it overnight, despite the pressures of rushing a maintenance update to market. Meantime, if you’ve already upgraded to Snow Leopard, just keep recent backups at hand, and avoid Guest accounts, new or old.

When all is said and done, it’s clear to me that Apple takes the Guest account syndrome extremely seriously. That doesn’t guarantee that a quick fix will come, but I doubt it’ll take long to resolve.

Update! And if anyone still cares, it appears that Microsoft may have recovered or most of the lost Sidekick data. That, however, doesn’t compensate for the cost for antidepressants and headache pills consumed by customers who suffered all this time.

For lo these many years, I have been a staunch supporter of regular backups and I speak from personal experience. On one occasion, I took a brand new MacBook to San Francisco for Macworld Expo. The drive failed upon the first startup, so I had to borrow a note-book from one of my publishers and then use “remote access” to retrieve my stuff from the desktop Mac at my home office.

On a few occasions, I’ve received phone calls from nervous Mac users who lost their data for one reason or another and didn’t have a backup available. This may be a case of attempting to close the barn door after the horses have left, but it’s not unusual. When Apple first introduced Time Machine, they said that slightly over a quarter of the Mac user base ever backed up anything, and only a small percentage bothered with dedicated backup software.

I haven’t seen the stats since Time Machine debuted as part of Leopard in 2007, but I’d hope they’ve improved substantially. More recently, the question of protecting your stuff has loomed front and center after the tragic server failure over at Microsoft’s Danger division. That episode left up to one million users of the Sidekick mobile phone with the threat of losing the entire contact list and photo libraries if their batteries run out, or the device is reset.

Now one would hope that the danger — excuse the pun — is behind them, and that the Sidekick servers are functioning properly again, but this whole sorry affair still goes to show that you cannot depend on a single source to protect your data. The more copies the better.

With the iPhone and iPod touch, this is a non-issue, since your stuff is backed up whenever you dock these gadgets with iTunes on your Mac or PC. Other smartphone makers also provide a syncing option, and RIM recently released a Mac OS version of their software, which is roughly similar to the Windows version. Indeed, other than the BlackBerry, you aren’t even depending on a single network of server farms to preserve your stuff.

As smartphones go, the Sidekick was a decidedly niche product. Over the years, a little over one million units were sold. That’s less than the Palm Pre in its first few months on sale, so it may not count for a lot. But if you are one of the people who embraced the Sidekick, it doesn’t matter. You’re still left with a product that possesses a totally insecure method of storing your data, and it’s doubly clear that Microsoft is totally incapable of offering any guarantee that your stuff will be protected.

Whether you use a Mac, a PC, or a Linux box, you will want to take this tragic incident as a huge wake up call. You can’t be cavalier about your files, particularly if they are important to your family or your work. Every computing platform provides a number of backup solutions, plus methods to sync your stuff when you need to have the same data in several places.

When it comes to email, I recommend IMAP, and if your ISP or mail service doesn’t offer that option, go elsewhere. Even the free Google Gmail service provides an IMAP feature — a strange one to be sure, but it works pretty well when you get used to the way it’s set up. IMAP means that you are depending on the cloud as the final storage location, but desktop email software will cache your messages locally, so if something happens to the server, you can still restore everything once you’re reconnected to a working system. This, by the way, argues against the exclusive use of Webmail.

Apple’s MobileMe provides a useful way to sync accounts, contact lists and other settings to your Mac, PC and iPhone. Here it’s serving as a conduit, so it doesn’t matter if the server-based data is somehow damaged or lost. You will simply see a prompt during the sync process, established in the MobileMe preference panel, giving you the option of specifying whether to use your local computer for the source information.

One of the data repositories you’re certainly going to want to preserve is your music library. While some of you may have a few dozen or a few hundred tunes, those numbers will frequently expand to encompass many gigabytes of data. I know some people for whom even the 160GB iPod classic doesn’t provide sufficient storage for their collections of music, videos and, of course, playlists.

One solution that I’ve been exploring lately is SuperSync, a file sync/backup solution that lets you keep your libraries consistent on the Mac or PC. It starts at just $25 for a two-pack, covering two computers. At $33, you get a version for five computers; $40 covers ten.

Compared to iTunes new “Home Sharing” feature, SuperSync offers unlimited two-way synchronization, and works on both a local network and the Internet. What’s more, the price you pay covers all updates for the life of the product. You won’t have to return a year or two from now and pay for the latest and greatest.

I’ve been working with SuperSync on my Mac Pro and 17-inch MacBook Pro and it’s super slick and definitely worth further investigation. Indeed, SuperSync supports pretty much all Macs from present-day Snow Leopard systems back to the days of Jaguar, along PCs running Windows 98 through Windows 7. Few apps can boast that level of compatibility.

Regardless of your chosen backup solution, choose at least one, and maybe even two so you know your stuff will be safe if and when the worst occurs.