Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me
show you ways that you can recover things you've deleted on your Mac.
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So this is something that happens to all of us. We accidentally delete a file,
maybe delete something and then realize shortly afterwards that we shouldn't have done that. There
are many different ways to recover deleted items on your Mac. Let's take a look at a bunch of them.
First I want to start with something that should seem obvious to most people.
But sometimes in our most stressful moments when we realize we've deleted something we forget about
this simple way to get something back. That's just to use Undo. So sometimes people will delete
some things and realize, Oh No! I shouldn't have done that. Is there anyway for me to get this
back? The simple answer is Edit, Undo Typing or Command Z. Now even if you know to do that
inside of writing some text sometimes in different situations it may not be so apparent. For instance
if you're writing something in a form in Safari Undo works just the same. The same as in Mail.
The same if you're working in a graphics app. Here I am in Pixelmator and if I delete something
there I can use Undo here as well. Also note Undo works multiple times. So you can delete something
once, twice, three times like that and then do Command Z, Command Z, Command Z to keep
going back in steps. It even works when you delete files. A lot of people don't realize
if you take a file and you drag it to the Trash or maybe use Command Delete to delete it
you can use Undo and get it back. Then you can continue to use Undo if you've deleted
multiple things or if you have changed the name of files or made all sorts of different
changes in the Finder. Undo works in the Finder just like it does in other apps.
Now where Undo fails is if you close a document. Usually you can't Undo if you've already closed
a document and reopened it. The list of things to Undo starts over again.
But there are ways to recover things that you may have deleted even after you've closed the file. In
most apps you're going to find the Revert To Menu here. So let's take this file here. I'm going to
Save it using either File, Save or Command S. Let's add some new things to it. I do line 2,
Command S and line 3, Command S. Every time I've Saved I've saved a version of the file. Now I can
go back here and see Revert To and I can browse all of the previous versions of the file here.
Now let's say I delete something by accident. Let's delete this. Now I could Save
and then if I realize I want to get this back even after closing the file and opening it up
later, I can use Revert To Browse All Versions
and if I go back one version I can see there's that text. I could even select the text here and
Copy it if I want. Or I can simply hit Restore to go back to that version of the document. This
works in things like Pages, Numbers, Keynote and some other apps, like third party apps have their
own version of this. For instance Microsoft Word has its own way of going to previous versions.
Now let's say you take a file like this and you move it to the Trash or I'm going to use the
Keyboard Shortcut, Command Delete to delete it. The easy way to get the file back is, of course,
to look in the Trash. The whole point of the Trash is to act as a safety net so you can't
accidentally delete something. It takes two steps to do it. You have to put it in the Trash
and Empty the Trash. In the meantime if you put something in the Trash before you empty it you can
restore it. So you could either take it from here and drag and drop it back to its original
location. Or what a lot of people don't know is you could actually go to File and then Put
Back or Command Delete from the Trash. This will actually take it back to where it originally was.
So it remembers its original location and you can see it removes it from the Trash and put it back.
This works for multiple files too. So if you take like three files from three
different places and put them in the Trash and then select all three files
in the Trash and do Put Back it puts them all back where they originally came from.
Let's say you emptied the Trash. So now the file seems completely gone. Well, not if you have a
Time Machine backup because Time Machine backups will save incrementally. So you can actually
go back in time, that's where it gets its name, to the last hour, the last day, the last month.
So, for instance, if I take this file here and I put it in the Trash. Then I empty the Trash.
You would think that file is gone. But I could actually go to Time Machine, I'm going to use
Spotlight to get there,
and then it will take me back in time in the folder I'm currently in. So I can see
the current version but I could go back and I could see there's that file and I can restore it.
Now I've got my file back. That's where it is great too if you've changed the file over time
so you've actually gone into the document, maybe deleted some paragraphs,
and then Saved it and now you want to go back to that version that has those old paragraphs in it.
You can restore it and you can even restore it in such a way that you have both the current one
and the old one and then you can go in and Copy and Paste between them.
Now there is another way to actually get old files back if you're using iCloud Drive.
If you go in your browser to iCloud.com and log into your iCloud account there
you have access to your iCloud Drive files here. There's also a hidden place where recently deleted
files are kept. You can go to Account Settings and scroll all the way to the bottom and here you'll
find Advanced. There's a link for Restore Files. Click that and you go to this restore section.
Look for Recoverable Files. So these are files you had stored in iCloud. Then you deleted them
and iCloud just hasn't gotten around to completely deleting them yet. So there's a chance that a file
you deleted is actually in here and you can select it and then Restore and get it back. Now keep in
mind here that there's also a Restore Contacts, Restore Calendars. So you can go into Contacts
here and there's actually a regular archive kept of your Contacts and the same thing for Calendars.
So if you've deleted something in one of those two apps and you're desperate to get it back
you can actually use this option. Although it is actually a pretty hard hitting action because it
actually replaces your calendars or contacts. It still gives you access to the old ones. So you've
got a lot of cleanup to do. It's not something you want to do unless you really need it.
Let's take a look at some other apps, like for instance Reminders. There's actually no way to get
back an item you deleted in Reminders. But chances are you probably haven't deleted an item. If you
select it, like select the entire thing like that, and delete that's deleting it. But most
of the time you just click here to check the item and it goes away. We can actually
get that back because that is not gone. That's just a completed item. So you go to View, Show
Completed it will actually show completed items here. So if you want to get something back you
can just select it again like that and now it's not complete anymore and back in regular viewing.
Notes actually has a little Trash of its own. If you have a Note like this here and I'll delete it
with the delete key. You can even see it tells you it's going to go into the Recently Deleted folder
there. So I can go back in here and I can get this back. Just drag it back to wherever you want
and now it's back in. So a deleted note isn't necessarily gone. You can look for Recently
Deleted there. But however if you change something in Notes or like deletes something
inside the note while you can quickly use an Undo, like that,
you can't get it back later on after the Undo option is gone. There's no version
History for Notes, unfortunately. Hopefully it's something Apple adds at some point.
Now Photos has a couple of options if you've deleted something or think that you have.
One thing about Photos is that Editing is nondestructive. So if you were to edit this,
let's enhance this photo. Let's go into Edit and Crop and crop it down
and let's say after doing all this you decide that you want the original back. This
actually isn't permanent. You could always go back into an edited photo. If you go to
Edit and you can always Revert to Original. So you always have the original photo there to get back
to it. But let's say you do Delete it. I'm just going to hit the delete key to delete this one
photo. It actually moves to a Recently Deleted folder. Just like with Notes. So you can go back
in here and you can see there's a timer under each photo. So this one has 29 days left and it
automatically be deleted forever. But in the meantime you can select it and then Recover.
Now what about Mail? Well Mail has a Trash kind of like the Finder does.
If you were to take this email here and delete it,
it is gone. It's not in the Inbox anymore or wherever mailbox you had it in. But if you look
under the Account. In this case this was from my iCloud Account, there's usually a Trash folder
or deleted or deleted items there. Select that and you usually find anything you've
deleted right there. You can easily restore it by simply dragging it back to the mailbox you want.
Now note that like all things with Mail this is highly dependent on the email
service you are using. All the Mail App does is let you see your email on that service.
So how Mail works really depends on whether you're using iCloud, or gmail, or Yahoo,
or Hot Mail or corporate email, or school email, or whatever it is, it's going to be different.
The folders could be named different things. Things are going to work in a different way.
But in general when you delete something it should go to some kind of Deleted items folder that you
can then look at. If you don't see it here then go into the actual server, like for instance
the web server for gmail or Yahoo or Hot Mail or the web server for your school or whatever
it is you're using your email from usually has all the options there and you could more easily
see where a deleted item may have gone to. So don't just rely on the Mail App which is just
basically a viewer to show you the server that has your actual email.
One last item you may want to get back after you delete by accident is an app. So you uninstall an
app or delete an app or somehow delete a part of an app and now it's not working anymore you should
always be able to reinstall any app that you've purchased. Now if it is a third party app you're
going to have to go back to the site where you got it from and redownload it from there. You should
have an account there. It should have a record of you making that purchase and it should be easy to
redownload at any major software provider is going to have that option. But if it is from
The Mac App Store it's even easier than that. Just go back into the App Store and you should be able
to redownload the app. It shouldn't charge you again or anything like that. It should just have a
download button. As a matter of fact you should be able to click on your ID here at the bottom left
and then see apps that you've downloaded in the past. For instance here's one and I don't actually
have it here. I uninstalled it from this Mac. But there's a little Cloud icon here. I can click it
to simply reinstall the app. As a matter of fact this is a really useful technique since apps can
sometimes be very large. You can uninstall them if you don't think you'll need them for a while
knowing that you can go back to The App Store and reinstall them later on.
So there are a variety of ways to get items back that you've deleted
from your Mac. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.