A sad story!
I knew this lovely young woman once who used to work at my local supermarket. We would chat and talk and then she disappeared for a while… she gone and had a child! Then about 6-7 months after this I went in one day and she was some what flat emotionally, I asked her if she was alright?
She said no someone had stolen her phone and it was not backed up. It also had the first 6 months of her child’s / family photographs on it.
A better story
A long time ago back when we had zip drives were a thing, and I did hardware work I had someone come in with a computer that had been used to write a thesis and it (and in-particular the thesis) had never been backed up!
It took me 3 hours sitting with the client next to me to get the machine up and working again and then to back the thing up to a zip drive. We were both covered in sweat by the time we sorted this problem out but we did it! But it was a close run thing, that could have cost this person thousands of dollars not just the 300 odd dollars that we charged her.
But you can’t always get data off a failing device… and theft of a device that has not been backed up is just sad.
So I suppose this is another of my rants and pleads that you back up your data! Find a way! Do it now!