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Please help! Deleted Items not showing in Trash

I have High Sierra 10.13.6 installed on my 13" MacBook Pro from late 2011. Ever since upgrading to High Sierra, deleted objects do not appear in the trash. Trash is now always empty after starting slowly. There isn't much room left! After deleting, let's say, fifty files, the trash either stays empty or shows one item. My files got destroyed; where are they going? I am not familiar with the 'terminal' investigation. Even though my signal strength is good, "mail" has stopped operating and all of my accounts are down. I'm using webmail at the time. Help, please.

Best Answered by

Amanda Wong

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

The file permission issue can be ruled out as the items you want to delete is in read-write mode, and they are not locked. Then, you can try Safe Mode to see whether the issue remains.

Safe Mode a macOS feature, starts up your Mac and carry out specific checks and stop some programs from starting or opening automatically, it checks your startup disk and, and makes an attempt to fix directory problems, if necessary.

If you find you can normally put deleted files into the Mac Trash in Safe Mode, then perform a regular boot to see whether the Trash folder back on track. If the issue continues in Safe Mode, you may need to reinstall macOS to get rid of the issue.

To recover mistakenly deleted files on Mac without backup, try iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac!