As for notifications - I'm not bothered by those. I think I get only a few every other week. Guess it's because I don't have many apps and the ones I have don't update every other day. Also, I allow some apps - those whose developers I trust, those that can't get worse and those I either don't care much about - to auto-update. But I manually track the updates for the apps I use daily. Don't want to find that things I'm used to are suddenly broken.

If there'd be a way to hook into Play Store to trigger a full backup before the upgrades, I suppose I would've enabled auto-updates for most apps.