It might seem impossible to recover files from Trash on Mac. But it's not! We will show you several methods for recovering data from the Trash including the use of data recovery software. With the Disk Drill data recovery app getting your lost data back is a matter of a few clicks and just several minutes. Moreover, it's free to completely scan and find your trashed data, even if your Trash was emptied. macOS Big Sur ready!
Check out our article Variables That Impact File Recovery Chances to better understand your chances of successfully being able to recover deleted trash on Mac OS X. If you only emptied your trash a short while ago and you did NOT use the “secure empty trash” function, then your chances are good.
Read on for a quick overview of the steps needed to recover Recycle Bin on Mac. For detailed tutorials, see How to Install Disk Drill and How to Recover Lost Files from Your Mac Internal Hard Drive in our Knowledgebase.
If you haven’t already, download and install the completely free Disk Drill Basic. Since you want to recover trash from your Mac’s internal hard drive, it’s better to install it on an external drive (and use Portable Mode). This way you’ll avoid the possibility of overwriting your lost files when you install the software.
Download Disk Drill
Drag to Applications Folder
Launch Disk Drill
Launch Disk Drill and if a popup window appears, uncheck all options – you don’t want to install anything extra at this point. When the main window appears, select your hard drive and click “Recover.” This will scan your hard drive and attempt to recover files deleted from trash on Mac OS X.
After the scan is complete, Disk Drill will show you the list of files it has found. Sometimes the recovered files do not have their original names preserved, so you can filter your results by date, size and type. Click the “eye” icon to preview the files right in Disk Drill.
Be sure to preview the entire file to make sure it is complete and uncorrupted. There is a good chance you will be able to recover emptied trash on Mac.
When you find the files you need, check the box next to them and click Recover. Disk Drill will walk you through the file recovery steps.
When you successfully recover the emptied trash on Mac, you will want to prevent it from happening again. The best way to do this is to use Disk Drill’s Guaranteed Recovery feature. Guaranteed Recovery monitors your Mac’s trash folder, and makes an invisible copy of any file you send to the trash.
This way you always have a copy – even after you emptied the trash. Simply install Disk Drill on your Mac’s hard drive and then follow the instructions in How to Use Recovery Vault and Guaranteed Recovery to activate it. After that you will never have to worry about recovering deleted files from your Mac trash again.
Once you have emptied your Mac’s Trash Can your recovery options are limited. The only reliable ways to recover from an emptied Trash Can on a Mac are:
If the data had been backed up before it was removed from the Trash Bin, you could easily recover it from the backup storage media. This is a fairly straightforward method of recovering your lost information. There is no mystery to the fact that you need to have backed up a particular file if you want to recover it from a backup.
Using data recovery software or a recovery service are the other methods to recover emptied Trash from your Mac. Both of these recovery methods take advantage of the way that the macOS deletes data. When the operating system deletes a file, it does not physically remove the data from the storage media. It simply eliminates the logical links that make the files and folders accessible by the system and marks the space they occupied as available for future use.
Until the space has been overwritten by new data, the original files can be recovered. If the storage device can be accessed by your operating system, data recovery software may be able to perform a Mac Trash recovery. If the device has experienced physical damage, a professional data recovery service may be required to get your data back.
There are multiple ways to recover deleted items on a Mac without software:
We will look at the details of using specific methods to recover data from your Mac’s Trash.
How to recover the Trash on Mac:
If you accidentally delete a file or folder, using the undo command immediately can get it back. On your Mac, the Command-z keystroke combination undoes your last command and will undelete your files. This command will NOT undo the emptying of the Trash Can. Once you empty the Trash, you cannot undo the procedure.
You may have decided on another backup solution rather than using Mac’s Time Machine feature. If this is the case, you can recover files deleted from the Trash using your backup media by following the steps for your particular backup solution. A good solution is to use Disk Drill to create a byte-level backup of your system which includes deleted files that can be recovered. Here’s how to recover from a Disk Drill backup.
A data recovery service may be able to recover files after the Trash has been emptied. Here’s what to expect if you need to engage a recovery service to get your data back.
Taking a few simple precautions before emptying your Mac’s Trash can save you a lot of time later. Consider following these practices to minimize the possibility that you empty the Trash along with important files that can no longer be recovered.
This is a simple activity that shouldn’t take too much time. Glancing at the sites in the Trash may draw your attention to some items that you did not want to delete. You can easily get them out of the Trash and then go ahead and empty it if that’s your plan.
It never hurts to take a backup before any activity that can potentially delete data. It might seem like overkill, but why not take a backup before emptying the Trash rather than afterward? You will be able to recover files that were in the Trash at the time of the backup without using recovery software.
Downloading Disk Drill for free gives you the capability to take a byte-level backup that includes files from an emptied Trash that have not been overwritten. You can use this backup with data recovery software to repair the logical links and make the items accessible to your OS again.
Updated on by Disk Drill Team
The Trash is the Mac equivalent of the Windows Recycle Bin. Follow these steps to recover the Trash on your Mac:
To recover deleted files from an emptied Mac Trash Bin:
Here’s how to recover deleted files from the Trash without software:
Yes and no. When you empty the Trash, the files are permanently logically deleted from your system. The physical data still exists until it is overwritten and can be recovered with data recovery software or a data recovery service.
Follow these steps to get back a file that you have sent to the Trash.
The Trash icon is located on the far right of your Mac’s dock.
Deleted files remain in their original location after you empty the Trash. The space they occupied is marked as available for use by the operating system and will eventually be overwritten by new data.
You have several options available to recover photos after emptying the Trash.
If your Trash Can has disappeared from your Mac’s Dock, you can try this method of recovering it.
If you have not already emptied the Trash Bin you can use the Terminal application to recover deleted files. Use this procedure:
Follow these steps to restore files from the Trash to their original locations:
Yes, there is a Trash Bin on your external drive. There is a hidden folder in the root directory of every drive named .Trash. Your system’s Finder settings can be modified to allow you to view the hidden folder. The Trash Bin located on an external drive can be used to restore recently deleted files through the command-line interface.
Use Deep Scan to be efficient even in the situations when almost no file structure is left. Even if the files were moved to Trash quite some time ago Disk Drill will apply its best knowledge of file signatures to locate the correct ones and bring them back to life. Files like XLS, DOC, AVI, MP4, JPG, and others are pretty easy to recover from emptied Trash on Mac when the needed signatures are found.
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