My e-mail folders 'on my mac' disappeared...
...I cannot afford to buy new computer.
The email issues were solved with 10.15.3, supposedly. I don't know for sure because I never had any email issues with Catalina before 10.15.3, so I can't verify that statement personally. Just read it somewhere here.
The Time Machine/Mail issue has been around since, I think, at least Mojave, maybe earlier. The only workaround I can think of is to use TM to restore the entire mail folder(s) to the previous, not trying it from inside Mail. If you do a bit of searching you can find the paths to where the various files are stored, usually in your Library folder. Your old folders MIGHT be there, or the may not. You'd have to do some digging to see. (But make a backup of what you have now, as digging around might also screw it all up even worse.)
Can you explain the photos issue a bit more? Are you talking about within Photos, the application, or duplicated files on your system? I used a program I found in the Mac App store called Dupe File Finder to clean up one drive I had where I threw all my image files as a temp storage, then let the software find all the duplicates for me to delete to clean up the mess. Seemed to work well for me.
One should always have a backup before allowing any system update. Always. Every time. Always.
But you've learned that, right?
Just to be clear, when the 1000 download, you end up with duplicates in the database? I say that because when I upgraded, I also saw that it was going to download a heap of images, but I let it run and in the end it didn't actually add them to the database because it detected they were all duplicates of files Photos already had. So, as I asked, did you actually end up with duplicates in Photos?My photo issues is in Photos,yes.My iphone is fine. The tech said to use Duplicate photo fixer,it does not work. Everytime I plug in my iphone, instead of having say 6 pictures to download, I have over 1000.
I do use icloud to back up pictures,but deleting the dupes from there does nothing.
Just to be clear, when the 1000 download, you end up with duplicates in the database? I say that because when I upgraded, I also saw that it was going to download a heap of images, but I let it run and in the end it didn't actually add them to the database because it detected they were all duplicates of files Photos already had. So, as I asked, did you actually end up with duplicates in Photos?
The product I listed in Post #5 is supposed to de-dupe Photos as well, but I didn't use that function because I don't have dupes in Photos.
I actually have 3 photo dupe removers, none of them work, in fact each time it seems to add them. So would it work to dedupe on an ap from my iphone or just keep trying from my photos library?
Yes,I ended up with duplicates in the data base.