How to Recover the Emptied Trash on your Mac without Much Effort

Updated on: December 16, 2022

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We have all been there before. We clean up our Mac and are trying to make our desktop space look as clean as possible to see our beautiful background. Maybe we just want to get rid of files that we haven’t used in a long time that we keep staring at every day.

Days go by and the next time that we come back to our Mac we need to find that one file or document but we can’t find it! Then, the thought “Did I accidentally delete that the other day when cleaning up my computer?” hits us. Don’t worry though, there are ways to recover our emptied trash and regain access back to our data.

Table of Contents

How to Find Trash on a Mac

By default, Trash is located at the end of the Dock on all Macs. The folder’s icon looks like a garbage can and might be a bit different depending on what macOS version your computer is using.

Trash can’t be removed from the Dock, but in some cases, when there are issues with your Mac, it might temporarily disappear. If you can’t find Trash on the Dock, try the following options.

Option #1: Finder

Here’s how to find Trash on your Mac via Finder:

Step 1. Launch Finder.

Step 2. Using the menu at the top, click “Go > Go to Folder” (or press Command + Shift + G).

Step 3. Type ~/.Trash in the search field and click “Go”.

Option #2: Terminal

If you’re comfortable using applications with a text-based interface, then you can access the Trash folder on your Mac via Terminal. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1. Open Terminal (go to Launchpad and type Terminal in the search field).

Step 2. Copy-paste the following command into the Terminal window and hit the Return key: cd .Trash

Step 3. Then copy-paste this command and hit Return: ls -al ~/.Trash

You’ll see a list of the files that are currently located in Trash.

Option #3: Desktop Icon

Another way to access Trash on your Mac is to add a Trash folder to the desktop. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1. Open Terminal (go to Launchpad and type Terminal in the search field).

Step 2. Copy-paste the following command into the Terminal window and hit the Return key: ln -s ~/.Trash ~/Desktop/Trash

Step 3. Go to your Mac’s desktop and look for a folder called “Trash” (it’ll look like a regular folder).

What Happens After you Empty the Trash on Your Mac?

Emptying the trash tells our Mac to allow that data to be available for new data when it comes time for us to save something to our hard drive. Think of it as a car in a parking lot.

When we empty our trash, the car is still in the parking spot but we just can’t see it anymore. If a new car came to the parking lot though, it could take that spot. This is why we can sometimes gain access to data even though we have emptied the trash. It may have not been written over yet by new data that has been saved.

If we have accidentally emptied our Mac trash, we want to start the recovery process as soon as possible to ensure that new information doesn’t overwrite the data that we’re trying to recover.

How to Recover Emptied Trash on Mac with Software

When it comes to recovering deleted data on your Mac, there are many tools that you can use. The one that we’re going to look at in this article is Disk Drill which is easy-to-use and has a high chance of being able to restore our emptied trash.

No matter what software you choose to use to recover the data from your trash, keep in mind that downloading and installing an app could overwrite the data that we’re trying to save. It would be a good idea to run the app off of an external storage device as if we run it off of the hard drive that we’re trying to recover data from, it could overwrite that data.

Step 1. Download Disk Drill for Mac.

Step 2. Launch the application.

Step 3. Select the hard drive that you want to scan for your emptied trash.

Step 4. I need to recover some screenshots along with a Boosted Board Ride that I went on. During that ride, I took the most beautiful picture of the sunset. Searching only by “Pictures” will make it easier to find the photos that I need to recover. To do this, I can click on the “Pictures” tab.

I don’t have to wait for the entire scan to finish either if I see what I am after. I verified that these are the right ones by looking for “Screen Shot” and “Boosted Board ride” in their name. When looking at the “Path”, you can also see that it verifies the trash location.

Step 5. I ride my longboard a lot though and want to make sure that this is the specific sunset picture that I am looking for though. I can preview the file by clicking on the “view” option which will show me a thumbnail preview of the picture before recovering it from the trash.

Here is what the image looks like after I hit “View”. Beautiful picture and just the one that I was looking for!

Step 6. Now that I have all of the pictures that I need, I can move onto recovering them. Click on the “checkboxes” that are located in the left-hand corner. Then click on the “Recover” button and that’s it!

How to Recover Emptied Trash without Software

If you’ve been regularly backing up your Mac, then you should be able to recover the emptied Trash without software. But the recovery results will, of course, depend on whether you’ve made a backup of your files before they were deleted or not.