So I spent quite some time getting my mavic air setup the way I wanted. I had tweaked settings to adjust the way it moved, stick sensativity, gimbal rotation, camera settings -- took me a while to get it all dialed in the way I like it. Then I am out to do some flying and "Update Required" comes up. All of my settings are gone, and the flight afterwards sucked because the settings were trashed.

What I don't understand is that it has %#$@! 8GB of INTERNAL RAM,  or if you're on a Mavic Pro or something you could put an SD card in which your settings could be backed up as a part of the update procedure.  I can't imagine the settings taking more than just a few megabytes.

If there is a way to back up the settings could someone let me know?

Unfortunately there's no way to automatically reset the settings once an FW update has been completed. You need to manually redo it although it would be nice if DJI somehow kept the settings alone after an update.

I write programs all the time that do this, and if you think about it the settings have to be stored someplace for the app to read them in as variables upon boot.  Those variables are could then be outputted into something like JSON, XML, YAML etc for the upgrade, and then read back in once the upgrade is done. The only issue is when you've got settings that conflict with the newer firmware -- then you prompt the user, "Your xyz settings need to be changed." So you might lose a few settings upon firmware update but not ALL of them.