Two days ago, 5 years of work deleted from duplicate "documents" folder, and Data Recovery shows no files missing. Apple support offers: nothing

I'm a solo musician and I have five years' worth of solo albums stored on my Mac. I also have an old laptop that, unfortunately, it turns out, had two "documents" folders — one that I'd been careful to un-synch "desktop and documents" with iCloud, but not the second. The second, apparently, was just a second folder that happened to be "called" documents and the Mac didn't see it as an iCloud "documents" folder.

My kids use the old machine to stream, and a few days ago I needed to go into it to upgrade OS — unfortunately, disk nearly full. So I went into scare-quotes "old documents" folder to clear it out. When I deleted large-sized files from that duplicate documents folder, I didn't realize that I was unwittingly deleting large files from a synched, second "documents" folder from my new mac — that had five years' worth of irreplaceable, up to the moment creative work.

A perfect storm, to be sure. I noticed today, two days later, that the underlying .logicx files that constitute two entire albums are gone.

I go to iCloud, click "data recovery" — and no files are there.

Trash emptied on old machine.

Because iCloud was synched the new Mac's "documents" (which wasn't really **documents**) iCloud was always supposed to be the failproof backup. I was doing everything right — I had a backup in iCloud, right?

I spend an hour on the phone with Apple support — they see nothing, and can't explain why "Data Recovery" sees no files, even though it's clear that these files were deleted 2 days ago (the folders under "documents" that are missing these files — 19 of them — all show the exact same "modified" time of two days ago at 2:36 pm). It says right there on the DR page that files deleted within 30 days are recoverable — except, apparently, these files. I am offered no recourse for Apple not offering the foundational recovery service for its paid iCloud feature that it claims to offer.

I download "Disk Drill" — nothing.

No backups — because the iCloud service backing up "documents" on my new mac was the backup.

Five years and thousands of recorded tracks, gone. I can never recover them.

I'll take any suggestions anyone has to offer. Anything.