jw5kitties wrote:
Thank you.It was probably helpful if I was smarter. I don't understand what is happening here either. My story briefly: I run Quickbooks from a desktop program for 3 companies. Having lost data before, I started to back up to an external flash drive which is only engaged when I am in Quickbooks. This drive was not engaged when I tried to clean up my cloud documents. I deleted some old QB files in that appeared in my icloud Documents folder from 2019,20, and 21 for one company. Of course, I emptied the trash. When I opened QB with the flash drive engaged, all the records for that company were gone. Now I want to restore my computer to a time before I deleted those files. I don't know how information on an external drive that was not in operation at the time could be affected, but they were. I guess I am just incredibly stupid but thought an external drive was protecting me from data loss. Now it seems there is no way to get it back.
Flash drives can be less than entirely reliable. Some are hot garbage, whether unreliable deliberately mis-sized. Some purchases from some vendors can be counterfeit devices, too. Sometimes those work, sometimes not.
Flash drives not properly dismounted can be corrupted.
Deleting files from iCloud will not alter those on a disconnected flash device.
A data recovery firm or a data recovery tool might be able to recover something from a corrupt flash device, but won’t be able to recover data from any erased or deleted files.
I would review for the files in the backup first. See if the files are present. If not, a restpration is pointless. That written, here is how to: Restore your Mac - Apple Support — this assumes Time Machine is working, and has some depth of backups. And I would back up the current environment before overwriting it with the restore.
Mistakes can also happen.
Local preference for backups is parallel Time Machine backups, with additional manual backups or,offsite backups for specific and more important files. This as Time Machine backups can sometimes be corrupted, and backup devices can fail, or can be lost, or stolen.
