I am going through this right now (October 2022). I wanted to download an application on my MacBook air 2015 but I needed version 11. I was currently on 10.14.6 or something. I bought an extra 50gb of icloud storage on my laptop and decided to move all my documents to the cloud. I checked off 'desktop and documents' and it cleared space on my hard drive saying it successfully moved all my desktop and documents to the cloud. Several minutes after downloading the software update, I got a notification saying an additional 30gb was needed to download the update so I gave up and decided to move my documents back to my Hard drive. I went to icloud options and unchecked the documents and desktop and all my documents were GONE. the files were there but the documents are all gone. I've gone through this entire thread trying to retrieve my data but nothing works. I don't see anything called 'Icloud Archive' and I checked documents and desktop again and nothing has appeared (its been 30 minutes). I called apple and they could not help me - said all my data has gone into limbo as it wasn't transferred to icloud properly. I also tried the recovery button in icloud.com and nothing was in there. How is it that my files were transferred but the actual documents in the files are not there? I tried installing recovery softwares but the 1gb for free thing is a lie. I'm being asked to spend hundreds of dollars on recovering like 3 files and these files don't even have the correct name that I am looking for. If this has happened to anyone and they have done the exact same steps as me and have recovered their information somehow, please reach out!!!