You can restore the original location of a file that has been sent to the Trash very easily. This quite literally sends a file that is within the Trash back to where it was originally stored on the Mac OS X file system.

Using the “Restore to Previous Location” feature is really easy, you’ll need to open the Trash can and then do one of the following (one is a keystroke, the other is a right-click option, both work the same however):



Keystroke: Select an item in the Trash and hit the Command+Delete keys to send that item to it’s location prior to the Trash

Contextual menu: Select the item and then Right-Click on the file within the Trash and select ‘Put Back’ from the contextual menu (see screenshot)

Both tricks work the same, here’s what the right-click context menu will look like:

This is limited to fairly modern versions of OS X (think 10.6 and beyond, so yes it’s in OS X Yosemite 10.10, and Mavericks, etc) but how amazingly useful it is, it’s one of those tricks you want to know exists and it will undoubtedly save you time from navigating around deep file paths.

And yes, you can select one file, many files, or all the files in the Trash if you want to, it will put them all back in their respective original locations on your Mac.