Hi All.
I was learning SC when 9 first came out and was chugging along nicely. Then I updated and everything was broken. total disaster.
so that scared me off.
What is best practice to prevent an update from ruining your work?
Do you back up the entire SC folder to a second drive/ Is it possible to restore that?
Looking for tips so that I can come back into the pool 
It’s odd as this is not standard behavior so actually I wonder what was broken in your case. In general I make full binary backup of the full scriptcase folder so I have everything. After every days work I export my projects. You can do a full backup too exporting all projects. It depends how much you have changed. Then you are able to re-import your project.