Folders are empty

In late March, 2024, we began experiencing multiple performance issues with our IMac and several times erased the hard drive and set up a new user.

Apple recommended that we not do a complete restore from our Time Machine backup because they thought this would reintroduce the software issue that seemed to be causing our performance issues.

We also increased our iCloud storage so that we could back up to iCloud. At the time (April 8 & 9), we thought we made a complete backup to iCloud of our files.

We copied folders selectively from our Time Machine backup and thought we had the problems solved.

Now, many of the folders on our hard drive appear to be empty. The folders in iCloud also appear to be empty.

The empty folders are not consistent. For example, for some financial accounts, the folder for the 2018 statements has all of them. But the 2019 folder and folders for later years have only one or two files.

Any ideas on how to locate our files.