A sad tale from a recent discussion posted on a cell phone support site I follow:
The poster asks:
"My IPhone 4 has completely died. I will need to get a new phone, was thinking of getting the 5C but want all my photos and music to go on new phone from my old phone. How can this be done?"
"You would need to do an iTunes backup and when you buy your new phone just "restore from backuo" options in iTunes! "
and
"You might have everything already in the cloud. Look into what you need to transfer. Apple is handy for that."
"So I can just go to "restore from back up" on my new phone, and then all my music will automatically be on my new phone?"
"This assumes you already have a backup. If you don't, you can try to back up your existing phone. Depending on what is the problem, you may still be able to access the memory."
"I don't think I backed anything up.. nor did I use the cloud. What about my sim card?"
Once again the importance of backing up your electronic devices is shown. Apple offers at least 3 ways to back up your important data, and makes it very simple to do so, but you have to initiate the process. You can back-up to iTunes either while you charge you phone connected to your computer (my method of choice), or wirelessly as your phone charges while connected to your home wireless network. You can also back up to Apple's iCloud service without the need for a computer, but large backups might need a fee-based account."Your SIM card just contains the information to connect your phone to the cellular network.
You can re-load any apps you purchased from the iTunes App store, as the store remembers you previous purchases. Same for music downloaded from iTunes. You ripped music should still be on your computer, and can be reloaded to your phone. Data such as your contacts, photos, etc., will be lost unless you have them backed up somewhere. Have you tried plugging it into a computer to see what happens?"
Android and Windows phones are similarly simple to back up to either Google's or Microsoft's cloud services. If you use google's web services such a mail, contacts music, etc, you are also automatically backing up your phone to Google's cloud.
Additionally third party services such as Dropbox and Flickr are offering uploads of photos and other documents wirelessly as well, so there is no excuse to lose your important data due to the loss or malfunction of your device.
If you have not set up backups for your phone, take a few minutes and do it now!