Documents GONE after update

Thanks...We are signed in and options are set correctly - still no files. We have the option checked for optimize mac storage and script editor. I was hoping those two alone might have been enough to help with the problem.

no there is no time machine backup. We will be adding a time capsule device to his home network after we finish our remediation steps on the macbook.

I'm afraid that I'm running out of options. As some further information I have used a copy of Disk Drill to search for deleted items (in the case they were deleted). We have found nothing; not sure if its the software that just can't find it on the new file system or they weren't deleted.....

I escalated this issue through tech support. Normally what should have happened is that the documents should have syncronized with iCloud but due to some strange thing happening they neither syncronized to iCloud nor deleted. In the case where the user selected not to store in the cloud but save on the computer and keep a copy there would have been an iCloud archive created on the mac hard drive. So - the files were neither deleted nor not deleted.

Going over this with Tier 1 I succesfully confused the agent and was placed with Tier 2. Tier 2 was amazing and she spent about 2 hours with me on the computer going over different settings. It was found during the course of our troubleshooting that there was more than 1.5Gb of data in a deleted folder that were unrecoverable (even after increasing quota). We escalated the issue to engineering, who within 2 days, were able to run a restore process on the files and place them in a recoverable area in iCloud.

Now please note that these files were never deleted but were, through the course of the high sierra upgrade, set to sync up with iCloud.

Thanks again and if any of you have missing files after selecting iCloud as a storage during high sierra update and are missing them and the archive folder -- check with apple support (they were fantastic).