You cannot deny the fact that videos are the crucial assets of your life. And if you delete your videos accidentally or they get deleted due to other reasons then you are in real displeasure.
Don’t worry! In this post, we’ll share a variety of methods to get back your deleted videos on an Apple Mac all by yourself. But before learning the data recovery methods, you must know how videos can get deleted in macOS.
Reasons for video deletion in macOS
- Use of Command + Delete keys to send videos to Trash
- Dragging and dropping of videos to Trash
- Emptying of Trash containing deleted videos
- Use of ‘Delete Immediately’ option to delete videos from Trash
- Use of Option + Command + Delete keys to delete videos
- Use of Shift + Command + Delete keys to empty Trash with a confirmation dialog
- Use of Option + Shift + Command + Delete keys to empty Trash without confirmation
- Use of rm command in Terminal to delete videos
- Use of rmdir command in Terminal to delete a folder containing videos
- Setting of Trash preferences to remove items from the Trash after 30 days
The next sections describe different DIY methods to recover your deleted videos on Mac.
Put back deleted videos from Trash
When you’ve deleted your videos from your Mac accidentally, use Command + Z keys straightaway to undo the delete operation. If you realize your mistake later, then look for them in Trash, as explained next:
- Open Trash, then search for your deleted videos.
- Select all the required videos by pressing & holding the Control key.
- Secondary-click, then choose Put Back to restore the videos to their actual location.
- Alternatively, drag-and-drop the videos to Desktop or anywhere else in Finder.
In case you don’t find the deleted videos in Trash, you can’t access them anymore through macOS. But the deleted videos remain on your Mac storage drive in an inaccessible state.
macOS simply marked the deleted video files as free in the drive’s file system and the free space is ready to be overwritten by new files. So, if you stop using your Mac immediately after deletion, there is a high chance of recovering your deleted videos by using a Mac data recovery software.
Alternatively, you can use Time Machine backup to restore your videos that got deleted due to diverse video deletion reasons.
Restore deleted videos from Time Machine
When you have set up a Time Machine backup drive and kept it connected to your Mac to take the incremental backup, you can restore your deleted videos from the backup drive to your Mac, as explained next:
- Ensure your Time Machine backup drive is connected to your Mac.
- Launch your Time Machine application.
- Navigate through the backup date by using Timeline or Up/down arrows.
- Select the found videos and click Restore to restore them to their original Finder location.
Time Machine backup can help get back your deleted, corrupt, lost, or inaccessible video files. But things are not that simple.
You may not have set up your Time Machine backup drive. Or your Time Machine backup drive wasn’t connected to your Mac to perform an incremental backup to include the recent videos that got deleted.
In such a case, try a Mac data recovery software.
Recover deleted videos using Mac data recovery software
When Trash or Time Machine was of no avail, use a Mac data recovery software to recover your deleted video files. But it is a must that you stopped using your Mac drive to avoid any overwriting on the video files. Steps to recover deleted videos are as follows:
- Download and install a Mac data recovery software on your MacBook, iMac, or Mac mini.
- Launch the software to scan your storage drive.
- Preview the deleted video files to check their integrity.
- Select all the required video files.
- Save the recoverable video files to a distinct drive location or an external storage device.
A data recovery program can recover data from a variety of logical video file loss situations including emptying of Trash, drive erasure, drive corruption, video file inaccessibility, etc.
Conclusion
We hope this post helped you to recover your deleted videos on your Mac. When you’ve trashed or deleted your videos, you can restore them from the Trash folder.
In the deleted videos are also removed from Trash, you can’t access your videos any longer. In such a case, use Time Machine backup to restore your deleted videos.
In the absence of backup, leverage a data recovery software for Mac, such as Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac to recover your deleted videos on Mac.
