My roommate played an April Fools’ prank on me by deleting a bunch of files from my Mac, an iMac running Snow Leopard. When I busted him on it, he said, “They’re still in the Trash can. Just drag them back out.” Well, I’m a stickler for organization, but I don’t recall where each and every one of those mistakenly trashed files used to reside. Is there a third-party utility that can help me? I’ve password-protected my Mac in the meantime.
Wow, your roommate is mean! Deleting someone’s files is way worse than leaving dirty dishes in the sink or never taking the recycling out. Anyway, your problem is highly solvable without relying on third-party utilities or Terminal commands or any of that. Head to the Trash and select the items that you’d like to restore to their original locations. (Remember that you can select multiple items by holding down Command, or multiple adjacent items by clicking the first and Shift-clicking the last.) Then just right-click to bring up the contextual menu, where you’ll see the Put Back option. Select that, and your files will be, well, put back, right where they used to go. That’ll save you time sorting them one by one--time that could be better spent beating your roommate about the head and chest with your keyboard.
Put 'em back, Finder!
Put Back is new in Snow Leopard, so readers using Leopard or an older version of Mac OS X can’t use it. If the Put Back option isn’t available, it means the system doesn’t know the item’s last location, usually because it was deleted from within an application (like iPhoto) and not deleted from the Finder. If you select multiple items and notice that Put Back is grayed out, try selecting the items one at a time instead.
