Recover Mac Files from Trash

Apple has provided commands in Mac OS X in which you can delete your files in three ways: using Command-Delete hot key, dragging the item to Trash and using system or contextual menu. System doesn’t delete these files or folders permanently, but instead keep them in Trash until you empty Trash or delete the item particularly. It protects against accidental file deletion and hence Mac Data Recovery needs. Consider a situation, you moved a file to Trash and it gets permanently deleted. Trash fails to retain these deleted files and hence you can’t restore required files. This behavior is generally observed on locally mounted drives.

It can happen if either .Trashes or .Trash folder have not been created and don’t exist.

Trashes is the hidden folder, created at the root of locally mounted drives. It stores Trash items temporarily.

Trash is the folder that stores account specific files for Trash. These files only appear for the particular account.

To solve the issue, you can follow these steps:

You can manually create Trash folders by using Terminal commands. Open Terminal application and use the following commands:

mkdir ~/.Trash
sudo mkdir /.Trashes

Then, you need to set its permissions and ownership using these commands:

sudo chown `id -un` ~/.Trash
chmod u+rwx ~/.Trash
sudo chown root /.Trashes
sudo chmod u=wx,g=wx,o=w /.Trashes

If you have lost any file due to accidental deletion, you can use third party Mac Recovery applications. Data doesn’t get permanently deleted from hard disk. When you delete files, you actually delete its metadata information from file system table. Original files remain there on hard disk.

Mac File Recovery applications use some algorithms which scan the media and recover data. They compare metadata of lost files with that present in file system table. These applications provide you an abstract view of process. Also, the interfaces they provide are interactive and hence are easy to use.

These software provide you several advanced features that assist you in recovery. Mac Recovery tools can be used in all cases of logical data loss, like accidental file deletion, disk reformatting, file system corruption etc.