It scans your hard drive for any files that are still waiting to be overwritten and recovers them for you, bringing your documents back from the computer grave. One tool that does this very well is Disk Drill. This means that if you have an app that can read the files directly off your hard drive, you could recover them in full if you do it quickly enough after deletion. Your data is still there until it gets overwritten by something else. Instead, macOS marks them as available space. If All Else Fails, Use Disk DrillĮven when you empty your trash, deleted files aren’t removed from your hard drive right away. Should you want to stop showing hidden files (they’re hidden for a reason, and there are a lot of them), you can run the same commands in Terminal again, but replace “TRUE” with “FALSE” on the first line: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles FALSE You can even empty it from Finder to clear some space on a USB stick. At the prompt, paste these two lines in there one at a time, hitting Enter after each line: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles TRUEĪfter running these commands, you should be able to see the “.Trashes” folder. Press Command+Space and type “Terminal” to bring it up. You can enable hidden files in Finder by running the following commands in Terminal. If you’re using macOS Sierra or later, you can view hidden files in Finder by simply using the SHIFT+CMD+. One of these hidden folders is “.Trashes” and it contains the trash for that drive. Whenever you use an external drive, your Mac creates a bunch of hidden folders starting with a period to help the drive work better with macOS. They’re hidden by default, though, so you have to do a little digging. If your file was stored on a USB flash drive or external hard drive, those have their own Trash you can check for deleted files.

And if you haven’t emptied it in a while, doing so might get you back quite a bit of disk space.

It should give you a list of files that you’ve deleted recently-at least, since the last time you emptied it. Right-click it and click the “Open” command. The Trash is usually located at the end of your dock.

Recover deleted files from trash on mac