After the fact, I showed him how to back up contacts ON THE MAC, not on ios. On the latter, you need a free app.
I have a few "Apple moments" myself.
There used to be books on "Apple Secrets" which were just things that were hidden from view. Now, the horror stories and how to prevent them are scattered all over the internet, usually buried deep in a reddit or stack exchange thread.
FWIW, icloud backups say that they back up essential stuff. Somewhere, there's fine print that defines "essential". Your playlsts obviously aren't essential enough for Apple. I don't know about time machine backups, but they only apply to macs. And I'm pretty sure that photos are handled separately, not in the device backups)
And your music?
Apple has clearly chosen to introduce new stuff (that we never asked for) rather than deal with data integrity issues.
For my own purposes, I might research what gets backed up and what doesn't, and then share that.
Until it changes again.
I just backed up all my devices to the mac. Then I backed up the mac twice. Once to time machine, and again to an image backup on an external drive using SuperDuper! (free for non-incremental, but bootable image backups)
I'm pretty sure that backing up to a mac backs up EVERYTHING, unlike iCloud backups. (I'll check on that)
I turned off icloud backups of the mobile devices when my internet connection was getting flakey. That seemed to coincide with visitors. Perhaps their devices were backing up at the same time. I may switch that back on.
When your mac says "MacOS must be updated in order to connect this device," when you connect it via USB, it's pure bullshit.
The device shows up anyway when connected, using iTunes or (newer MacOS) shows up on the desktop, and you can back it up at that time.
It ain't the same Apple since Steve Jobs left us.
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