Metapuzzle: Hints

• This is a pure meta (there's no information apart from the answers and the flavortext).
• As with many pure metapuzzles, the only aha moment in solving this metapuzzle, basically, is figuring out how to solve it (once you know how to solve it, you can solve it, assuming you have enough answers; there's no very hard or long answer-processing step). As all these hints are clues at that, there will be no notification of which hints clue the aha moment, only of which hints are especially spoilery.
• The flavortext is somewhat helpful (though not extremely so).
• The reference to "backups" in the flavortext is helpful, with "backup" having its normal meaning of duplication of something (not of reversal, as in backing up).
• This hint spoils somewhat more than most hints do. Taking the answers two at a time, we see the first answer is always alphabetically before the second. This suggests that this pairing is useful, as indeed it is.
• What do each pair of answers have in common?
• Each pair of answers have at least two letters in common, often more.
• This hint spoils somewhat more than most hints do. Where in the answers are the letters that the answers have in common?
• This hint spoils basically the whole puzzle. Each pair of answers has a bigram (two consecutive lettters) in common.
• Just putting the bigrams together gives us nonsense. What can we do instead?
• This hint spoils extraction. First read the first letters of the bigrams to get the first word of the metapuzzle answer, then read the second letters to get the second word.