my phone is going to drive me crazy

i have an iphone 13 mini. i refuse to get another phone for another couple years because (one) i love the size of my phone--i have really tiny hands, and (two) i don't have the money to trade in or buy another phone right now. unfortunately, she's getting kind of laggy and the battery life is abysmal. i'm telling you i get max 5 hours on a full charge. luckily, i have apple care and can get a free battery replacement since the battery health is under 80%.

that brings me to my next point... i've heard that you should backup your phone before you get a battery replacement. and due to the size of my phone it's a good idea to because there is a higher risk of damaging something like the chip due to the small size. i logged onto icloud and, let me tell you, none of my photos were backed up onto icloud EXCEPT for eight to ten year old photos that have long since been deleted. i just spent an HOUR going through and deleting photos. now my camera roll is down to 1,710 photos rather than the 8k it was. then i found out my photos on my phone weren't even synced to icloud. now my phone is fighting for its life uploading what's left to the cloud. it's already overheating, and i haven't even performed a backup yet.

it's on me for not going through occasionally to delete meaningless screenshots and duplicates and tiktoks i saved four years ago, but why does such a long process exist to begin with? all for a battery replacement that probably won't even affect my phone.

i'm really hoping i didn't waste the last hour doing all of this, and now i'm paranoid that when i do eventually upgrade that everything will be lost because i didn't backup properly. i hate technology sometimes. 

and to add on to all of it, my photos never synced to my laptop (i have a macbook due to my college's laptop requirement). so i had to go through this and mass delete. now my laptop is warm. i'm really hoping i didn't cook it.