Best way to ensure correct progress loads

I lost all my progress last night dealing with a cloud issue and picking the wrong save file , one of the community members got back to me within 24 hours and got it all back .. im BEYOND grateful.. if you see this , thank you again!!! Can someone just answer the following so i dont experience this again

If for whatever reason i need to download the game again , can someone confirm the CORRECT way to load my progress?

It started on a fresh account and i thought hitting sync to cloud would load my last game , but it didnt .. how would i go about loading progress if need be ?

Also do you guys refresh Game Center or do any manual saves ? Dealing with This got me scared and thinking of losing progress in any o