Sometimes when l find myself going through my systems l see last back up date. The last date was June.
Thinking that can't be correct l connected to iTunes and saw a much newer update. Realised then that l update mostly to my PC. It seems l only do it before a major iOS update.
Or when l bump into the right department.
I'm backing up to iCloud automatically, every day. I'm also backing up to iTunes regularly, just in case. One of these backups (encrypted) helped recently, when I couldn't restore from an iCloud backup.