10 Ways To Recover Things You Have Deleted

Accidents happen and things get deleted. Here are several ways you can get back deleted text, files and other items on your Mac.
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Video Transcript: 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.
Comments: 5 Responses to “10 Ways To Recover Things You Have Deleted”

John king
2 years ago
How to recover blue tooth device that was told to “ forget this device “
iPhone 11 ver 15.5
Thank you, Gary. It was very useful.
Gary Rosenzweig
John: Treat it like a new device. Put it in discover mode (see they device's docs for how to do that) and then it should show up in Bluetooth preferences as something you can connect to.
PETE
Gary:
Do you have a tutorial on how to retrieve deleted text/SMS messages from an iPhone? Thanks!
Pete: I don't think there is a way, unless your mobile provider somehow keeps them around.
Comments Closed.
10 Ways To Recover Things You Have Deleted

Comments: 5 Responses to “10 Ways To Recover Things You Have Deleted”

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