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My 12 year old MacBook crashed (MacBook Pro mid 2012, running macOS Catalina), so I pulled the hard drive out to recover the data on it. I connected the old MacOS drive to my new MacBook as an external drive, I just removed it from my old Mac book, put it into a hard drive case and connected it as an external drive.

I was able to recover most of my data and see most of my folders, but I was not able to find the Trash folder on it. My question is very simple, where can I locate the Trash folder on this external MacOS drive? (It is the main trash folder that on the OS is indicated by the bin, i.e. the main trash folder). The hard drive is only has one partition with the OS on it.

I tried to check for it using CMD+Shift+. and searching for .Trash using CMD+Shift+G. I was not able to locate it.

any help is much appreciated.

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    What version of macOS was running on the MacBook Pro when it crashed?
    – DavidRecallsMonica
    Commented Aug 12 at 14:57
  • command Shift G doesn't 'search' - it just takes you to the path that you type. If you don't know the path, you won't find anything.
    – benwiggy
    Commented Aug 12 at 15:43
  • @DavidRecallsMonica it was Catalina
    – sck
    Commented Aug 12 at 16:29
  • @benwiggy I was trying to find .Trash, but you are right, I don't know the exact path
    – sck
    Commented Aug 12 at 16:30

1 Answer 1

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The usual place for the Trash folder is in the top level of the user domain: ~/.Trash/

So inside the User account that was running at the time.

Of course, making regular backup copies to another device would preserve all your data, including anything that's accidentally gone to the Trash.

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  • Thanks for the reply @benwiggy I will try the path and see. I have backups of other folders but it crashed before I could undo a few files I had deleted.
    – sck
    Commented Aug 12 at 16:33
  • ~/.Trash is not visible in Finder - need to use ls -la to see it.
    – Gilby
    Commented Aug 12 at 22:39

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