IMHO, this is really the Right Answer.

Unfortunately, making backups is one of those lessons that most (if not all) human beings have to learn the hard way, through the painful, repeated loss of data that they care about. When people tell me that they have lost their phone and need my number again, that tells me that not only have they not backed up their phone, but they probably aren't backing up their laptop or desktop, either, and I can expect a call from them when their hard drive eventually fails.

Due to my interest in computers at a very young age, I learned this lesson decades ago (anyone remember cassette tape storage?) and have developed a multi-tiered system of backups which ensure that no single loss is catastrophic. (For example, most of my important data exists in 3 or 4 different physical locations not all connected via a network.) There's no way to prevent all loss, but I figure that if a meteor takes out the entire western seaboard, I'll have bigger problems.

No, it's not easy, and it's not simple. But backing up the data you value is the best way to guard against not only ransomware, but against a lot of other stuff that can happen to your data. I just wish there were a way to get folks to learn from the mistakes of others instead of learning it the hard way, as I had to do.