Apple Users

Second, or any old time --- Try this, log into icloud.com with your icloud account name and password.
Check to see what's there. Everything should be.

I recall that Apple puts your home directory by default in iCloud (D'oh!!!)

I undo a damn lot of Apple "defaults" when I set up anything.
Hopefully, you only deleted the links to those files, which still exist in iCloud.
I can't say how to get them back "home" for real.

I back up all my systems with an external disk the same size as the internal one, and I use SuperDuper. It's free for just such a "mirror" job. The external disk becomes an exact copy of the internal one. It's even bootable, they say. Tedious, since it is not incremental. It's a disaster recovery system. Going to do that as soon as I back up whatever devices I have to the system disk. That way, they are also backed up.


Oh, and I totally agree with others who use an external disk to store almost everything. The internal disks are expensive, and unless you have a terabyte, are too small to hold everything you download, and all your e-books, pictures and videos and so on.

Best part of this is that you can take that disk elsewhere, like a friend's house and show off gigabytes of great photos you saved there. Try dragging your iMac around. It also is easy to put in your evacuation kit (we have wildfires).

At home, another system can find it as "shared" on your home network, so you don't have to move it around.

HTH