Though I am a self-professed brand whore, Apple is really starting to piss me off.

I had backed up all my TV shows purchased through iTunes on my external hard drive. Smart, right? So after the big crash, I copied everything down to my new computer, and then synched it to my iPod. Oh, but first, I had to get a third party program to grab stuff from my iPod and put it on my Mac, because Apple doesn’t like you using your iPod as a hard drive – you might be using it for naughty pirate activity or something. Whatever. So I got all my data on my new computer, and then synched to my iPod. Then I deleted off my computer the stuff I don’t need – namely $200 worth of television shows that suck up enormous amounts of space.

Guess what happened? The next time I plugged in my iPod, it removed it all. Yep. No more TV shows, anywhere. Lovely.

At a friend’s urging, I emailed Apple (let me say, finding a customer service email on that website is no mean feat, and don’t even get me started on Adobe) and said my stuff had been eaten.

I got an email back saying I could re-download everything I’d ever bought, and chiding me for losing my data. Obviously they didn’t read my original email where I said I had backed up everything, but then freaking iTunes ate it all.

So now I’m re-downloading about 50 gigs worth of stuff. Why am I downloading all of it, rather than just the stuff I want, you ask? Well, I tried that, but iTunes freaks out and starts re-downloading the stuff again anyway. So I’m going through all my files (again) and trashing the old ones, which I will delete when all this crap is done re-downloading.

Not the most efficient system ever created. And I guess I’m going to burn my library to DVDs or something, since there’s no way to sync your iPod without it removing stuff you’ve deleted from your hard drive.

Microsoft is looking pretty sweet right about now.