[X Style (Pure) Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] acejavelin:
^^^ THIS!!!

People need to consider phones for what they are... a big chunk of plastic, metal, and GLASS that we fumble with hundreds of times a day. You need to anticipate it will break, brick, bootloop, get lost, stolen, have an update fail, or whatever once in a while, they are not infallible and neither are we. Be prepared, it doesn't take much and it isn't complicated.

Pictures seem to be the most important things to people... INSTALL GOOGLE PHOTOS and set them to backup automatically, it is super easy, and assuming most people charge at home every night, the most photos you would ever lose are 1 days worth. And go to https://photos.google.com once in a while and open the app once in a while and see if they are backing up.

Install an SD card in your phone, even if it's a little 16GB or something, set it up as

portable storage

(important), and set the camera to save items there instead of internal memory... This in combination with the above measure will be a 99.9% guarantee you won't lose any pictures or videos.

People seem to really like having SMS and MMS copies, then INSTALL SMS BACKUP & RESTORE by Carbonite and setup daily, weekly, or monthly backups of all your text and picture messages to your online service of choice (I recommend Google Drive). Then log into Drive and check it once in a while.

Use Google's Backup Transport, it's built into Android... it will maintain a list of apps you have installed and if the app developer is relatively current with the features of Android, it will backup your settings too, and in the event you need to restore, factory reset, move to another device, or whatever, you can restore all your apps pretty quickly.

Use the Google services and your account, when creating contacts, calendar appointments, notes, etc... Use the Google account option so contacts and appointments are saved permanently to Google and you can access them from anywhere. Use cloud based services like Keep, Drive, etc. so you always have backups of stuff and avoid apps that don't support Google (or other cloud based) storage for important data.

Other apps have some facilities to backup settings, data, and other things related to the app.

Oh, and keep your Google account secure... know the password, have your backup and recovery information up to date so if you lose the password you can reset it via your work email, a SO's phone number, etc. Your Google account is your key to everything if you follow my suggestions.

All of these things can be done a stock device, without root or anything else special... As much as I hate to say it, if you lose data on your device it isn't Moto's fault, Google's fault, or anything/anyone else's issue, but it's your fault. This is no different than the data on your computer, laptop, tablet, or anything else you might own, it takes a little bit of prep and planning to keep from losing anything.

I have thought to myself many times I should write a tutorial on doing these things, and some other common apps and Android tools to backup data and maintain it automatically, but with the way people blame me sometimes for bricking their device with my other tutorials I have decided not to do so.