I frequently upgrade to newer releases of Fedora, which is my primary distribution. I also upgrade other distros but much less frequently. I have also had many crashes of various types over the years, including a large portion of self-inflicted ones. Past experience with data loss has made me very aware of the need for good backups.
I back up many parts of my Linux hosts but my /home directory is especially important. Losing any of the data in /home on my primary workstation due to a crash or an upgrade could be disastrous.
Source:
https://opensource.com/poll/19/4/backup-strategy-home-directory-linux