How to recover deleted files on a Mac

Deleting a file on a Mac rarely erases it right away. macOS simply marks the space the file occupied as available — the underlying data usually stays on disk until something else writes over it. That gap between "deleted" and "overwritten" is your window to recover it, and this guide walks through every way to use it, starting with the free ones.

The single most important rule comes first: stop using the drive that held the lost file. Every app you open, every file you save, every macOS background task, and even routine indexing can overwrite the data you're trying to recover. If the lost file lived on your startup disk, that's harder to avoid — so work quickly and avoid installing big apps or copying large files until you're done.

Two things mostly determine whether a deleted file comes back intact: how much the drive has been written to since deletion, and what kind of drive it is.

On a traditional hard disk (HDD), deleted data tends to linger until it's overwritten, so recovery odds stay high for a while. On a modern SSD — which includes every Apple Silicon Mac and most recent Intel Macs — a background process called TRIM often erases the underlying blocks within seconds to minutes of deletion, to keep the drive fast. That means SSD recovery is genuinely time-sensitive: the sooner you act, the better. It also means no tool can promise SSD recovery after TRIM has run, and you should be skeptical of any that does.

Before any software, rule out the easy wins — the file may not be gone at all:

The Trash. Open it, find the file, right-click, and choose "Put Back" to return it to its original folder. If you emptied the Trash, keep going.

iCloud Drive "Recently Deleted." If the file synced to iCloud, go to iCloud.com → Drive → Recently Deleted, or in Finder open iCloud Drive and check there. Files often sit here for up to 30 days.

App-specific trashes. Photos has "Recently Deleted" (hidden until you click it in the sidebar) that holds images for 30 days. Mail, Notes, and many third-party apps keep their own recently-deleted areas. Always check the app the file belonged to.

If you have a Time Machine backup, this is the cleanest recovery of all — you get the original file, intact, with no carving or repair needed.

Connect your backup drive, open the folder where the file used to live, then enter Time Machine (from the menu bar clock icon, or open the Time Machine app). Use the timeline on the right to step back to a date before you deleted the file, select it, and click Restore. If you back up to a network drive or a second internal volume, the same steps apply.

Even without a dedicated backup drive, macOS often keeps temporary local snapshots of your APFS startup disk — especially if Time Machine has ever been configured. These can contain a copy of your file.

Open Terminal and run `tmutil listlocalsnapshots /` to see any snapshots and their timestamps. If one predates your deletion, you can browse it by entering Time Machine while disconnected from your backup drive (it falls back to local snapshots), or mount the snapshot read-only. Snapshots are space-limited and rotate out, so check sooner rather than later.

When the file isn't in any trash and there's no backup or snapshot to restore, recovery software is the next step — it reads the drive directly to find data the Finder no longer lists.

Two rules keep you safe here. First, don't install the recovery app onto the same drive that held the lost data — download it to a different disk, or to your startup disk only if the loss happened on an external drive. Second, when you recover, always save the recovered files to a separate location (an external drive or a different volume), never back onto the source. Writing recovered files onto the source is the most common way people overwrite the very data they're trying to save.

Start with a quick scan. It reads the filesystem (APFS, HFS+, NTFS, exFAT, or FAT32) and surfaces recently deleted files with their original names and folders in seconds. If the quick scan doesn't find your file — common after a format, a corrupted volume, or a long time since deletion — run a deep scan. Deep scan carves files straight from raw disk blocks by their format signatures, recovering data even when the filesystem's record of it is gone. It's slower but far more thorough, and it's the mode that finds files nothing else can.

Don't recover blindly. DataRecover Pro shows thumbnails, file metadata, and macOS Quick Look for found files, plus a per-file confidence score that tells you what's pristine versus partially recoverable. Scanning and preview are completely free and require no account, so you can confirm your specific files are recoverable before paying anything.

Use the preview to prioritize: recover the high-confidence files you care about first, and decide whether a partial result is worth keeping for the rest.

Select what you need and recover it to a safe location. Files pulled from a damaged or partially overwritten drive sometimes come back corrupted — a photo that won't open, a video that won't play. This is where DataRecover Pro differs from recovery-only tools: its repair engine rebuilds corrupted photos, videos, and documents on the way out, so you end up with files that actually open instead of broken bytes. If you've ever recovered a file only to find it unreadable, that missing step was repair.

Software recovery is for logical loss — deletion, formatting, corruption — not mechanical failure. If the drive is making clicking, grinding, or buzzing noises, isn't recognized at all, or repeatedly disconnects, stop. Continuing to power a physically failing drive can make the data permanently unrecoverable. Power it down and consult a data-recovery lab, which can work on the hardware in a controlled environment.

Recovery is a safety net, never a substitute for backups. Once you've gotten your files back, set up Time Machine to an external drive, and ideally add an offsite copy (a second drive you keep elsewhere, or a cloud backup). The 3-2-1 approach — three copies, on two kinds of media, one offsite — means the next deletion is a shrug instead of a panic.