Why does this happen? It's driving me nuts.

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9. Well, to be honest, it didn't go well. At all.

That enlarged dock is gone, but so are all my current jobs (anything after my last back up in April) and any other jobs that I did since then. .

Also gone are any new fonts I added after 2014 -- and there were dozens and dozens of them.

I'm sure that I will find that I'm missing other items too. It's too depressing to even look. I did find some very old files under "recents". Years old.

Cloud Watcher did his best to see if he could figure out how to retrieve the files, but no luck.

(As to an Apple Store, there's one about 10 miles from me. The last time I was there, they had zero luck in starting my older iMac --- which had that awful "circle with a slash through it" display when I tried to start it.)