You can save photos and other data to icloud, but that's not always a certainty. My iphone 5 bounced out of its holder during a bike ride and eventually died. When I went to restore my stuff from the cloud, it pulled in an old version of my backup and I lost a lot of contacts and calendar entries. So, it's not fail-safe.
I do a weekly manual backup of my photos to my laptop manually. That way I can also save them to an external hard drive and regardless of what happens to my phone, I have the photos and videos of my grandkids, which are priceless.