incredible levels of onedrive bs

Hello,

I'm having a very difficult time with onedrive and I feel like if I could talk to a person at microsoft, they could solve it, but evidently that's not an option so I'm hoping you might have some ideas.

I don't use my personal onedrive. I have a person outlook account which I use for email.  I always save my files to what I believed was my computer.  There's an option to save to the onedrive and an option to save to what looks like the computer- I save to the computer.  I was aware that onedrive was automatically taking my files too and I didn't care enough to stop it at the time.

My email stopped working.  Again, email is the only reason I have this account.  So the email not working is a problem.  It said it couldn't work because the onedrive storage was full of my files (that I didn't want it to have in the first place).  So, I logged into the onedrive and deleted all the files.  Doing this did not make any difference to my email- it still didn't work- so I also deleted the files from the recycling bin.  This did fix my email! 

Unfortunately my joy was short lived because I then realized by deleting the files from my onedrive, I had also deleted them off my computer.  I did not expect that to happen because again, I do intentionally try to save them to the computer.  Evidently, when you save it to your computer you're actually not saving to the computer- something I now know.  Possibly too late...

So I looked up: can you restore your onedrive files?  Oh yes you can!  You just have to have a Microsoft 365 account.  Well I did not have one of these on my personal account because again, the only thing I'm using it for is email.  But ok, I figured I'll pay $15 to get my files back.  Sure.  

Paid for the account.  Clicked on 'restore my files'.  It says I have to prove it's me.  So I give it the biometric info (finger print) and password.  That's not enough- it also needs to send me a text message! Only problem is, that never works.  I don't know why it doesn't work- the phone number is correct and my phone can do 2-factor authentication for other services.  It has never worked for microsoft.  It says it sends the code but it doesn't.  So I can't do this 'third step' authentication.  

Realistically, was I going to get my files back if it did send me a text? Probably not.  Let's be serious- nothing is working here.  But now I don't know what else to try.  It says I can wait 30 days to change the phone number.  But I don't even want to change the phone number- it already has my correct phone number!!! It just doesn't send me a text. 

All I want:

1. My files back on my own computer (I'll turn off wifi or something in future I guess? There's got to be a way for me to save them to my own device, right??? Surely)
2. My email to work. But truly at this point, that's secondary. If I can't have a working email, whatever, I'll make a gmail account. 

I have done the official contact microsoft form.  It claims a human will email me at an unspecified time.  I highly doubt that but also it could be in 25 years- it doesn't say.  So I'm trying to keep problem solving but I'm out of ideas.  

Does anyone have any ideas for new avenues to try?

Thank you