When starting steam today I realised that borderlands had an update and for some reason required me to click install rather than update automatically.
After logging I realised that my 57 characters have been rolled back to 53 and almost a hundred hours were gone.
Kinda killed any of my desire to play the game atm, pretty sad… Moral of the story is to backup your saves before updates…
Back them up ALL THE TIME! People should have known this since AT LEAST Borderlands 2! EVERY game in the series has had glitches that could corrupt or delete save files. It was such a problem in both BL2 and The Pre-Sequel that one of the Game Updates incorporated an automatic secondary backup save that the game could use to recover your data from. And frankly, that should have been put into BL3 for precisely the same reason! 
It’s just common gamer sense to maintain redundant saves if you have the option to do so.
I assume this is PC? Has this happened with Xbox before and if it did, how do you backup saves in Xbox besides cloud saves (I assume that works)?
You can’t because Microsoft doesn’t want you to have access to your saves on Xbox One. That’s why I switched to PC for BL3. On the Xbox 360, you have access to your game saves to back them up on an external drive. On Xbox One, you do not. And that’s why the Devs should have put in an automatic secondary backup save, just like they did for BL2 and The Pre-Sequel.