Is it possible for an entire folder to just disappear in iCloud?

If you'd asked me that last week, I would have said no. Now, I'm not so sure: Short version: a folder I use almost daily disappeared from my iCloud drive last week on all devices. I did not/would not delete it. There was nothing in my trash. There was nothing in my "Recently Deleted" folder in iCloud. Longer version: last week, I used spotlight search on my MB Pro to find a file I'd been working on. Thinking perhaps my search wasn't working properly, I used Finder to navigate to the folder I knew contained the file. To my surprised, the folder was not there. The folder (named Misc. Documents) is the only one of the 29 other folders that was missing from within that folder. This is a folder that I open and close items in daily. To find it, I checked to see if the folder had been inadvertently dragged into another folder. I used spotlight search (which is working properly) and nothing turned up. Next, I checked the trash. Nothing there. After that, I logged into [iCloud.com](http://iCloud.com) and checked the "recently deleted" folder. There were just 4 files in that folder. What is odd is that while those four files had been deleted by me in recent days, they were not the only ones. I'd estimate more than a dozen files have been deleted in the week prior, but those did not show there. The files in the recently deleted folder were not from my missing folder, either. iCloud says it holds files there for 30 days, so even if I had deleted my missing folder, it should still be in the recently deleted folder since it would have been deleted in the last 2-3 days at most. Borderline panicking now, I got on the phone with Apple Support. They ran me through several steps which did not turn up the folder. They said they needed time to speak with engineers. Today they called back to let me know there was nothing I should do and that I needed to be using Time Machine to back up my device. They're probably right, but the mobile nature of my work makes it pretty tough to attach an external hard drive daily to store backups. I make this post mostly as a warning: if you store anything in iCloud, be sure you have a backup or that you can live without it. Secondarily, if anyone has any ideas on how to make a folder that I didn't delete come back to life, I'm all ears.