One thing everyone could and should be doing is backups.
Luckily I had Time Machine backups of my iOS backups and I managed to avoid losing too much data.
As a sidenote it seems like Apple has pretty much neglected their offline backup and syncing workflow to drive more people to just pay for iCloud storage. Half the time my iPhone takes hours just to get detected by the mac when plugged in.
I don't have issues with my computer (PC or Mac) detecting my iPhone. Generally need to make sure iPhone is unlocked after plugging it in. What is tough is the large size of my iPhone (X gb) and how small my Mac's HD is (2X gb).
You actually bring up another issue. There is no obvious way to backup iPhone locally to an external hard drive. So either pay the mac SSD storage tax or the icloud tax.
Again, depends on usecase but then it becomes integral to your existing workflow instead of an addendum that you end up forgetting to do
The whole purpose is to make the failing of one be effectively extremely noisy and irritating
It's like what I do with raid. I have a script that will shut the machine down on drive failure and then will use dialog(1) to say something like "hey bozo replace the fucking drive first" when you boot it up and then it will shutdown again and be unusable.
Make the complaining show stopping, loud, rude, and disruptive. Because if the next one fails you're screwed