What To Do When a File Goes Missing On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you what to do if a file goes missing on your Mac. 

So let's say you go to work on an important file and you look and it's not there! It's not in the folder where it usually is. It doesn't seem to be anywhere. What can you do?

Well, of course the first and obvious thing that you've probably already tried this is to look in the Trash. So on your Mac one way to go to the Trash in the Dock all the way to the right, click there and it should open up the Trash. Now, anything you delete normally by obviously dragging it to the trash or selecting it and using Command Delete to delete the file you put the file in the trash. So you can look here, look in List View, and then Sort By Date Added. So the date added to the folder. So if the file that has gone mission should be near the top. But you can also Sort By Name if you've got a lot of stuff in here and you know the name of the file so you can quickly locate it. Now if you find the file in the Trash, like say this one right here, you can open up a Finder window and drag it to that window. But you can also select it and do File, and then Put Back or Command Delete. So kind of Command Delete does the opposite in Trash than it does in regular folders. Puts it back instead of putting it in the trash. The advantage of Put Back is that is puts it back to where it already was. 

But you probably already did this and you probably didn't find the file in the trash which is why you're watching this video. So let's look at some other possibilities. There's another Trash and it's for the most part in sync with the Trash on your Mac but you should look just to be sure. So you want to go to Safari and then you want to go to iCloud.com and log into your iCloud Account Web Apps. So these are web versions of things like reminders and mail and calendar and so on. One of the things that you'll see here is Drive. This is kind of the web version of the Finder but only for files that are in iCloud. So you won't find any files here that are just like in your Movies and Pictures folder or maybe in your Documents Folder if that is not set to be part of iCloud. But you will find Recently Deleted here. If you go to that and this is equivalent to the Trash and you should find the same files that you find in the Trash on your Mac, but only the ones that are part of iCloud. They were thrown away to the Trash from some other local location, not iCloud, then shouldn't be here. But the iCloud files should be here as well as the trash from your Mac. However, there are occasions where you might find something that's here in Recently Deleted at the iCloud Drive website that's not in the trash on your Mac. In that case you can select it and Recover. You can also simply drag it to one of your Favorites folder here to move it there as well. So, it is probably not there but it is worth taking a look. 

Your next step, and I hope this is obvious to a lot of you but I know not all of you, is to use Time Machine to look in the backup for your file. If you're not using Time Machine of course this won't work. Like let's say you expect to find this file here but it is simply not there. It is missing and you've looked in the Trash and it's not there. You've looked in iCloud Drive's Recently Deleted and it's not there. Your next step is to use Time Machine. You may have Time Machine up here in the Menu Bar but you can always just use Spotlight to launch the Time Machine App. Then that will take you to this interface that will allow you to go back in time to look at earlier versions of the list of files here. So that file is missing here and we're at Today, Now. We can use arrows here or the little timeline on the right to go back. So we can just go back one step here and take a look and see that earlier today the file was indeed there. You can now select it and click Restore and it will put the file right back where it was. Now this is why is it so important to have a Time Machine backup or some other backup that has a history of files. Because if your idea of a backup is just to clone your drive or just copy everything from your Drive to another Drive  and put that other drive away for safe keeping, well, the clone there is going to have exactly what you have on your regular drive. Now if maybe you made your clone yesterday and you want to go back to yesterday's file that might be fine. But if the was also missing yesterday and that was when you did the backup then the cloned drive is also going to be missing that file. You have no way to get it back. But the Time Machine gives a history. You may not find it yesterday or the day before or the day before that but you go back one more day and there's the file. You must have deleted it shortly after that. But you can go back in the history of that folder to find that file. That's what makes Time Machine so useful. It's not just for a total disaster like your Mac breaks or stolen but it is also for finding mission files. So if you haven't started using Time Machine or a similar solution that has a History, like an online backup that includes that history, you should start using one now before you run into a problem like this. If you have already run into a problem like this you may be out of luck this time, but you can prevent it next time. 

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Now if you've accidentally deleted a file, well you might be jumping to a conclusion that what you did by accident was deleting it. You could have, by accident, done something else to the file that makes it go missing. For instance you could have accidentally moved it somewhere. If you've move a file to another folder it looks like it is gone because you won't see it where you expected it to be and you won't find it in the Trash either. But it is simply in another folder and you just didn't notice. Maybe you did accidentally dragged or some other motion moved the file. So, for instance, this file here it is easy to accidentally move it somewhere else. Now it is missing from here and you have no idea where it could be. It's not listed here anywhere. Not in the Trash. So how do you look for this situation. Well, you want to do a search for the file. Now you could use Spotlight Search but that searches lots of other places like the web and for apps and for stuff like that. You're looking for files so you might as well use this Finder Window and do a plain file search. Command F is the fast way to start this. It gives you this whole interface here. You can see here the Search Scope. You want to make sure you're not starting in that same folder. You already know the file is not there. So you probably want to go to This Mac and look everywhere for the file. Then you want to search for it by name if you know the name of the file. You don't even have to know the full name. You can type Name and Search for just a part of the name and then maybe you'll find it. If you find it you can see its path right here, but at this point you can just drag it right from the search results to where you want it. Even if you don't remember the file name though remember you can search by the contents of the file. So if you can't remember what you called this but remember that this word and this word were in the file then that will come up with it even though neither of those were in the file name. So try a few different things to search for the file to see if you can find it that way. 

There's another possibility. Instead of accidentally deleting a file or accidentally moving a file it is even easier to accidentally rename a file. Watch as how I can just press Return, hit some keys on the keyboard and then Return or just click away and now the file has got a different name and it goes to a different place in the list of course and it looks like it is completely missing. I'm never going glance here and notice that there is this file there and that that might be the missing file unless I look at all the different files. Again, Search here is what you want so you cover your bases so if it was moved or if it was renamed and you want to look for the contents of the file. Like that. You'll see this file here with the weird name. You'll use Quick Look Spacebar to look and you'll say, oh that's my file I must have accidentally renamed it. 

Now here are special situations you might run in to where you think the file is deleted and it is actually not. Let's say you've got some files on your Desktop. Then all of a sudden they're not there. They're gone. It looks like you've got nothing on the Desktop. What you may have accidentally done is turned Off the icons on the Desktop. You can fix this very easily by actually going to the Desktop folder. So you're not looking at the Desktop itself but you're looking at the files that should be there. So if you're look at your Desktop folder in a Finder Window then you'll see the files that are really there even if they are not appearing on the Desktop. You can rest assured that they are not deleted. You can turn On the icons again by going into System Settings, then Desktop & Dock and then look for Show Items Here. Make sure this is turned on so you see them. This technique also works in situations where you may have dragged the items somewhere else on the Desktop, it's behind another window, it is kind of half off the edge of the screen. So if you can't find something that is on the Desktop the first stop should be to go to the Desktop Folder in Finder and look at the definitive list of what's actually there. 

Another option might be that at some point you accidentally went into your iCloud Settings and under iCloud Drive you turned off Desktop & Documents folders. You switched this Off. Your Desktop & Documents folders will use the local folders that are in your Home folder and not the Desktop & Documents Folders that are in iCloud Drive. But that folder still exists. So you can just go to iCloud Drive and at the top level here you'll see Desktop & Documents. If you've got that Option turned On, as you saw I did, then you'll notice this is your Desktop Folder. It is the same files you see here. But if that Option is turned Off then what is under Desktop and iCloud Drive is going to be different. This is a different location than your local Desktop folder which would be in your Home Folder and you would see Desktop & Documents here. So if you notice the Desktop & Documents option is turned Off and you're missing files in either Desktop or Documents look in both your Home Folder and in iCloud Drive for Desktop & Documents. Look in both places for those files. 

Finally this brings us to Recovery App. Say none of this works can you use a Recovery App to get your file back. Well, the answer is most certainly not. If we're talking about the internal drive on your Mac and you're using a fairly modern Mac and a fairly modern version of macOS that once the file is completely deleted Time Machine or some other backup is the only way to get it back. It won't be left in pieces on your drive for some sort of recovery software or recovery service to get for you. It is not impossible but it will probably cost you a lot to try and you probably won't get any results from it. Anybody trying to sell you recovery software or a recovery service is probably going to talk about like external drives using older drive formats that aren't encrypted and aren't using modern things like trimming the contents of the drive and, yeah, there's always that extreme small chance that they would find something for you but almost certainly not. So unless it is the only copy of a map to King Solomon's gold or something like that then it is probably not going to be worth trying. 

So I hope you are able to use some of the previous techniques to get your file back. Thanks for watching.