Back up your stuff! You never know when something unexpected will cause you to lose it!
My sympathies lie with all the unlucky souls who are statistically all but guaranteed to experience data loss because it is so hard to do the right thing. Reminders which shunt people towards backup best practice are fine, but they are not a substitute for systems engineered to prevent data loss in the first place.
1) Your primary computer 2) An external hard drive you keep at home 3) The cloud (Dropbox, google drive, etc)
This protects you from device failures, cloud failures/lapse of service, theft, and accidents at home (fires, floods). I personally keep the physical hard drive disconnected from the computer and in a safe, which should protect from power surges and weird edge cases like solar storms. And then I have a recurring calendar reminder set to back up my phone and computer to it every month. If my livelihood depended on that data (or if the stuff I most cared about like photos weren’t also on my phone) I’d do it more frequently.
For most other types of data, you're in Apple's walled garden. iCloud is an option, as long as you don't care about privacy and security of course. You can also use iTunes on a Mac laptop, as long as you're willing to buy more expensive Apple gear with more Apple software shenanigans just to get to your files.
Otherwise, your best bet is probably to pay for one of the third-party applications that will help you to get your own data off your own device without relying on Apple's methods. Sadly, that was not a joke. But such software does exist, and some of it seems to have a good reputation.