Claude deleted my project — can I get it back?

The 10-minute recovery checklist

Work through these in order. Don’t skip ahead — the earlier ones are non-destructive and the most likely to work, regardless of which Claude you were using (Claude Cowork, Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any other agent that edits files on disk).

• Check the macOS Trash. Click the Trash icon in the Dock. If your files are there, right-click and choose Put Back to send them to their original location.
• Open Finder ’s Recents. In Finder’s sidebar, click Recents. It lists every file recently touched on your Mac, even if the parent folder looks empty. Sort by Date Modified.
• Search for a known filename. Press Cmd + Space for Spotlight and type a unique word from one of the missing files. A file that’s been moved, not deleted, will show up here.
• iCloud Drive Recently Deleted. Open Finder, click your iCloud Drive in the sidebar, scroll to the bottom-right of the window and click Recently Deleted. Or go to icloud.com/iclouddrive and check the Recently Deleted bin there. Files live there for up to 30 days.
• Google Drive trash (if the folder was synced). Open drive.google.com/drive/trash and look for the files. Right-click to restore.
• Dropbox version history. Right-click the folder in Finder, choose Version history, or sign in at dropbox.com and use Deleted files in the sidebar. Dropbox keeps 30 days of history on free plans, longer on paid.
• Time Machine. If you have a Time Machine drive connected (or a network volume), open the folder in Finder, then launch Time Machine from the menu bar or Spotlight. Scroll back to before the Claude session and restore the missing files.
• The editor’s own history. Word, Pages, and Notion all keep per-document version history — open the document and look for File ’ Revert To (Pages), Version History (Word, Notion). VS Code and Cursor keep a Local History / Timeline panel for each file. Plain text files in TextEdit have no history — skip to the next step.

Was Claude editing inside a sync folder?

If your project lived inside iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive, that’s good news for recovery — their trash and version history are your best friends right now. But there’s one macOS-specific trap worth knowing about.

iCloud Drive “Optimize Mac Storage” can replace local files with small placeholder stubs when disk space gets tight. When an app (or an AI agent) writes over a stub before iCloud has had a chance to download the real file, the original contents can be lost. If you suspect this, check System Settings ’ Apple ID ’ iCloud ’ iCloud Drive for the Optimize setting, and check the iCloud Recently Deleted bin immediately — that’s often where stub-overwrite victims end up.

What if none of that worked?

If the folder wasn’t synced anywhere, wasn’t covered by Time Machine, and the files weren’t opened in an app with its own history, your remaining options are:

• Ask Claude itself, in the same session, to re-create what it just deleted. If the conversation is still open, the model often still has the contents in context. This is not recovery — it’s a re-write — but for short files it can be enough.
• Stop using the Mac for non-essential work and look into a file-recovery tool that scans the disk for orphaned blocks (Disk Drill, Data Rescue, and similar). The longer you keep writing to the disk, the lower the chance of recovery.

Setting up the safety net for next time

Once you’ve recovered what you can — or made peace with what you can’t — the goal is to never search for “claude deleted my project” again. CoworkRestore is a Mac menu-bar app that quietly saves a snapshot of any folder you add to it, before and after each AI task. When something goes wrong, you open the folder’s history, see exactly which files changed, and undo only the bad files while keeping the good edits.

It works the same whether you’re using Claude Cowork, Claude Code, or any other agent that edits files on disk — the snapshots live alongside the folder, not inside any particular tool. For Cowork-specific recovery steps, see Claude Cowork deleted my files. For the wider “an AI editor wiped my work” case, see Cursor deleted everything.

Configure it once on the folders that matter — client work, your novel, the launch plan — and forget it’s there until the day you need it.