How To Recover Deleted Files On your MacBook

By Chinweike Onwuchekwa Last updated Jan 17, 2021

Practical solutions to know how to recover deleted files on a MacBook, even files that have been emptied from the trash. Accidentally deleting files on a Mac is a common occurrence in our daily life. These are the most typical scenarios of deleting files on your Mac computer:

Dragging a document, picture, or video to the Trash can.
Right-click on a file and select Move to Trash.
Emptying the Trash can to remove deleted files permanently.
Using the option command delete hotkeys.
Using the delete immediately option under the drop-down list of the files menu.
Clicking on the finder menu and selecting empty trash in the drop-down to delete files.

Can Deleting files by any of these ways be recovered?

Answer: YES

There are practical methods that can be used to recover deleted files on a Mac, even recovering files after you’ve emptied the Trash Can.

Restoring Files From Trash Can Via Putback Option.

If you drag the file to the trash/right-click on the file and select delete. If you haven’t emptied the trash or deleted the files permanently, the file can easily be restored by the following methods:

Click the “Trash Can icon” in your dock to see the deleted files.
When you find the files, you want to restore “Drag” to the desktop or “Right-click” them and select the “Putback option” to recover deleted files from the Trash (file will be returned to its original location).

Note: Deleted files will only remain in Trash Can for 30 days, after 30 days your Mac will automatically remove them permanently.

Restoring Files From Trash Using The Undo Option

Accidentally you deleted an important file. You can easily restore them on Mac using the undo option without performing other actions immediately after deleting the file/folder. Here are two simple ways:

Go to “Edit Menu” on the top and select the “undo” move or
Use “Cmd + Z” keys to undo the delete operation.

Restoring Files From Trash Via Mac Terminal

Follow these steps:

Go to the ”Applications folder”.
Open the Utility folder.
Next select ”terminal”.
Type this command ”CD .Trash” and press return then input ”MV space and the file name” right after that and hit return.
Then Type quit in the terminal.

After you’ve all these steps, enter the name of the deleted file in the search bar and hit enter. The deleted file will appear and you can select it and save it to a safe location.

Note: The terminal command can recover files that were placed in the Trash Can but if the trash can has been emptied the terminal command option won’t work.

Restoring Files From Trash Using Time Machine

An option for permanently delete files on your Mac and emptied the Trash Can. however, you can restore deleted files if you have ”time machines” set up on your Mac.

What is Time Machine?

Time Machine is Apple’s backup solution for the Mac so if you have an able time machine you can recover files that have been completely emptied from the trash bin.

launch time machine on your Mac/find it in the Applications folder/search using spotlight.
Find the specific files you wish to restore by scrolling up and down/using the arrows to locate them.
You can preview files to confirm by pressing the ”spacebar”.
finally, click the restore button and then the deleted files will be returned to their original location.