All the files that moved to trash will stay in your Mac Trash bin and you can turn back to cancel the deleting by putting them back at anytime. Even if you accidentally emptied Trash bin, as long as we take actions quickly, it is still possible to recover the emptied Trash bin on your Mac.
This article outlines 7 ways on how to recover emptied or deleted Trash on Mac, for free, even without using any 3rd party software.
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Recovering emptied Trash on Mac is not an easy task, even though you can restore without software, you have to use a backup. Using data recovery software is the best bet, like Cisdem, which is neither expensive nor complex.
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Cisdem Data Recovery for Mac
Free Download macOS 10.9 or later
Yes, we can.
Usually, when you move files to Trash, they are not permanently deleted. You can easily restore them by putting them back. But if you empty the Trash bin, are these files gone for good?
No! In fact, the erased files still remain on your Mac hard drive. When you permanently delete files or empty the Trash, you only lose their directory entries. That means you are not allowed to access or view them in normal way. Meanwhile, the spaces of trashed files are marked as free and can be occupied by new files you add. Once overwritten by new data, the deleted or emptied files would become unrecoverable.
So stop working with the hard drive where Trash was emptied to avoid file overwritten, and take quick actions to recover lost files, this is just why a dedicated data recovery program is highly recommended because of its high recovery rate.
To recover deleted files from emptied Trash bin on Mac, one of the most important issues to address is how many files can be brought back. To get the highest recovery rate, it makes sense to use a professional Mac Trash recovery tool, which avoids recovering files in vain.
Cisdem Data Recovery can be your first option in this case. Due to its powerful recovery ability, fast scan speed and easy-to-use UI, it is highly evaluated and recommended by users even those tech authorities. Cisdem can be used to recover deleted or emptied Trash files in different scenarios:
This Mac trash recovery tool is 100% safe to use on Mac running macOS 10.9 or above. It can recover nearly all deleted files from your Trash, Mac hard drive, even external storage devices. By supporting files in 200+ formats, like video, audio, photo, this tool helps you recover all types of file. Also, it supports repairing damaged videos, images and even documents.
Free Download macOS 10.9 or later 
Like many other users new to this recovery issue, you may be looking for a possible way to recover emptied Trash on Mac for free. And luckily, we do have solutions to do so.
The premise of adopting this option without downloading any 3-rd party software is, you have backed up the Trash files in your external hard drive or online storage services. For your reference, 4 kinds of backup platforms will be explored as following.
If you have turned on Time Machine for backup, then there are possibilities to recover emptied Trash from Mac Time Machine.
If Time Machine is not turned on, how to recover emptied Trash on Mac without Time Machine? Please keep reading.
If you set up iCloud Drive on your Mac and store your files into it, the files will be synced with your iCloud account. So you may find a backup of your Trashed files in iCloud.
For files you can not find in your iCloud Drive, go to iCloud Drive Settingshomepage > Data Recovery > Restore Files, choose the files to restore, then download them to your Mac.
It is much likely that you are a Google user and benefit a lot from using the Google Drive service. If you have a habit to back up files in Google Drive, it would be possible for you to do a free Mac Trash recovery.
For files you cannot find in Google Drive, go to Trash, then find the files and right click to choose “Restore”.
Moreover, another backup option that most people could ignore is checking attachments in your mail box or messaging app. That’s because your trashed files might be received or sent as attachments via email or message previously.
Therefore, it’s a good try to recover deleted files from Mac Trash free by looking for attached files from your messenger archives or email history and downloading them again.
In fact, as you can see, for any important files that you have accidentally deleted from your Trash bin, if there is a backup in built-in utility, online storage service, email box, or file transfer program, there is always a way to recover them back in similar manner.
Don’t have a backup or need some time to evaluate Cisdem Data Recovery? Here is the free solution with free software.
Speaking of the best free Mac data recovery program, PhotoRec stands above others all, and has done for a long time. This open source software is dedicated in recovering photos from external and internal storage devices. Though there are not full features, it does more than just restoring photos, it can also recover videos, audios, documents and so on.
The interface is not user-friendly, same as other command-based programs, it is difficult to use. But it is worth spending some time to get familiar with it, since it is free, and can practically recover emptied Trash files.
So far, once sadly you don’t succeed to perform the Mac Trash recovery, the end wit to recover emptied Mac Trash is contacting data recovery service center. When the Trash files are detected to be recoverable, restoring data from an emptied Trash with a data recovery service must be the most expensive one among all the recovery solutions, but in some specific cases it’s the most trustworthy choice.
Just search online to pick a reliable data recovery service, contact it for a recovery estimate, then ship your Mac hard drive to the recovery center, and wait for the technicians to retrieve your Trash files with specialized software or hardware.
It's impossible to recover emptied Trash through Mac Terminal.
We noticed that many articles suggest users to recover emptied Trash using Terminal, running commands on your Mac to get trashed files back to their original locations. Well, this is quite misleading. Terminal only allows recovering deleted files that you have moved to Trash bin, but cannot restore files from emptied Trash. In other words, Terminal just puts deleted files from Trash back to original storage path, it cannot restore permanently deleted files.
It's impossible to recover emptied Trash with Undo Command.
We may know that Mac computer keeps track of every action you perform, allowing users to undo recent changes to files. Don’t be deceived by it. The Undo command (or Command+Z) won’t work if you need to reverse the emptied/deleted Trash and cancel the permanent removal of trashed files.
If you’ve tried to recover emptied Trash files with backup and your files are still not back, talk or visit a local data recovery expert, by searching “data recovery services near me” online, you will get a list of local services to recover your files on Mac.
But if you feel unnecessary to do this, the easiest way to recover emptied Trash on Mac is absolutely to use the best Mac Trash recovery tool --- Cisdem, which guarantees a high recovery rate.
Connie Yu has been a columnist in the field of data recovery since 2011. She studied a lot of data loss situations and tested repeatedly to find a feasible solution tailored for each case. And her solutions are always updated to fix problems from the newest systems, devices and apps.
Sherry
You're right, Connie. Using Terminal or Undo Command cannot recover my emptied Mac Trash. Some bloggers are really misleading. Though PhotoRec is free to use, I'm not that tech-savvy to deal with the complex commands. So I choose Cisdem. Thanks. It did well.
Jennie
I don't have a backup, so I tried the data recovery tool, it helped.