Half of files disappeared and iCloud has not synced

Yesterday half of my files vanished while I was using Zoom. I have looked in Trash, Recents, and Downloads and they are nowhere to be found. On top of that, my iCloud has not synced with my computer -what I have on iCloud is what's left on my computer, everything else is gone. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason behind what's missing and what's left -some things are gone that were created/saved on my computer at the same time as files that are still on my computer.

I'm using a 2022 MacBook Air that I've only had for 6 months and have 219.11 GB of storage left on my hard drive. I'm currently trying to back up the files I still have so I can do a software update to see if that might make them magically reappear. But my computer is having a hard time even copying one file at a time to my external hard drive.

Any ideas????