You dragged a folder into the wrong place, or deleted a file a second too early. On a Mac most of this can be undone, as long as you know where to look.
Undo the last action in Finder
Right after a mistake, choose Edit ▸ Undo in Finder, or press ⌘+Z. It reverses your most recent action in Finder, such as a move, a rename or moving items to the Trash. The Edit menu names what will be undone, for example "Undo Move of …".
Get a deleted file back from the Trash
Files deleted with ⌘+delete go to the Trash first:
- Open the Trash (in the Dock).
- Select the files, right-click them and choose Put Back.
They return to the folder they were deleted from.
Emptied the Trash? Time Machine
Files deleted with Delete Immediately (⌥+⌘+delete), files from an emptied Trash, and files that were overwritten don't go to the Trash. If you use Time Machine, open the folder they were in, choose Enter Time Machine from the Time Machine menu in the menu bar, go back to a time when the files were there, select them and click Restore.
Undo the last 50 steps with Ctrl+Z
CrossDriver Files, a free file manager for Mac that works like Windows File Explorer, keeps an undo history like Windows does: copy, move, rename, delete, new items, extract and compress — the last 50 steps, with Ctrl+Z to undo and Ctrl+Y to redo, shared by every window.
- Undoing a delete puts files back from the Trash exactly where they were, even if the folder is gone.
- Undoing a copy or a new item moves it to the Trash — undo never deletes anything for good.
- Each step remembers which files it made; if one was replaced in the meantime, it's left alone.
- Replaced files don't disappear: when you choose Replace, the old file is moved to the Trash first.
Only Shift+Delete deletes permanently, and it always asks first.