The whole iDevice ecosystem is complicated. I've seen even tech savvy people suffer data loss or prolonged inconvenience. A lot of it is caused by bad design and buggy software, but a lot of it is also caused by Apple arrogantly throwing up intentional roadblocks.
I consider myself technical, but when recently faced with a task of backing up contacts from an iPad to iCloud - I got scared.
The iPad had an iCloud account set up. It was unrelated to the current device's owner, so I couldn't back the device up to that account. There is a 'Remove account' button, but what's going to happen when I remove the account? Is something going to disappear from the iPad? How am I going to know?
I figured I should back up to the Mac first, then switch to the new iCloud account and restore if anything happened. I didn't even do that, because the last backup of contacts from the iPad got lost (probably because there was another iPad sync'ed with the same Mac) and I wasn't sure what would happen when I sync'ed it this time.
Maybe technical users tend to overthink these things, but data loss does happen and the current Mac's ecosystem is indeed confusing in that regard.
Similarly, I consider myself technical but the whole iCloud syncing business on iOS and OS X Lion (may have improved in ML) is a mess and I managed to lose documents. Syncing has to be turned on and off in multiple places with non-intuitive descriptions of what may happen.
Turning syncing off warns that data will be lost (huh? I don't want you to delete anything, just stop syncing the two data sets).
Tis all a muddle.
And then backup. You have to choose between backing up to this computer and backing up to iCloud? Why? I certainly don't trust iCloud with my only backup, but having it as a remote adjunct would be handy. Why can't I back up to both?
There is one way to back up to both iCloud and your computer. First, set up automatic iCloud backup. Then, whenever you plug in your iOS device, right-click on its name in the iTunes sidebar and hit 'backup'. It will do a one-time backup to your computer.
It's not perfect, but it works really well for me. Daily automated backups to the cloud + backups on my computer whenever I update the OS or upgrade devices.
"Roadblocks" is not why these people didn't have a device properly restore and back up. The point is that there shouldn't even be a way to mess up this procedure, not that YOU want direct access to the file system.
