Apple e-mail deleting and restoring
I'm running Catalina on my MacBook Air and want to update to Big Sur, but I need to free up space on my hard drive. My drive is 250 GB and I'm using 230 GB. I checked the usage and found almost 40 GB is being used by my e-mail, even though I delete messages regularly and empty the Trash.
While looking for places to free space, I found I had 111,000 emails saved in the Archives folder. I thought these were copies of e-mails, so I deleted the Archives and then deleted the Trash. However, I have now lost almost all my e-mail, including all the e-mails I had sorted and stored in about a hundred separate folders.
All these e-mails still exist in the gmail on my iPhone, and all e-mails are in their correct folders on my iPhone, too. Also, my overall MacBook storage hasn't changed at all, showing I still have almost 40 GB of emails.
I have everything backed up on Time Machine, and I have 150 GB of storage space available on iCloud. How can I now restore all those e-mails back into their folders on my MacBook so I can start again more carefully? And when I've done that, and I want to delete older messages from those folders, how do I then delete those messages so that their removal frees up space on my MacBook hard drive?
MacBook Air