householdbinary files gone

@hi_dylanaa  Yes, I would say that this is exactly the problem.  Each Tray item has several associated files, and even one missing file means the Tray item shows as corrupted or doesn't show at all.

I don't know exactly why this happened, but one possible cause is OneDrive syncing your files and flagging these as duplicates, or somehow not uploading them at all.  It's difficult if not impossible to find out after the fact, but you can check onedrive.com (including the Recycle Bin) for any stray files.

For now, I'm not sure there's anything you can do to recover the saved sims.  If you feel like experimenting though, take a different HouseholdBinary file, like the new one associated with your newly-created sims, and rename it so it has exactly the same characters after the exclamation point as one of your Tray items that is missing this file.  If you look closely, you'll notice that the HouseholdBinary file starts with 0x00000000! , whereas the other types start with 0x00000001! and count upwards from there; but each set of files associated with a single Tray item has the same characters after the !.  So the idea is to rename a file from another Tray item to match, and perhaps trick the game into reading the whole set of files.

Make sure to keep each file extension as it already is: the HouseholdBinary files must end in .householdbinary just as the others must end in .hhi or .tray item or whatever they currently are.

I have no idea whether this will work at all, or if it does, whether the sims' data or relationships will be corrupted.  But if you can load the households at all, you can edit their details, or save the sims separately and import them when creating a new household in CAS.