The desktop is one of the important common folder locations on macOS, and many Mac users are used to saving some images and files on the desktop. It is very convenient to view and find what they want through the icons. What if all desktop items disappear suddenly for some reason during the day? This is not imagination, it is a fact. Yesterday it happened to a colleague beside me. Fortunately, we used some methods to help her retrieve what was missing. We share these to you and hope these solutions can help you, if you encounter the same situation.
1. Restart Finder
In the event of a Finder crash or unknown issue, the Finder will not work properly and you can’t view desktop items. Restarting the Finder may make the Finder work properly. Click Apple menu -> Force Quit… -> Select Finder and click Relaunch button to restart Finder.
2. Turn on hidden files in Finder
Check if all desktop items has been hidden by other applications. Access /Applications/Utilities, open Terminal app, enter the following command string to show hidden files: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE;killall Finder
3. Check Stacks
If you are using macOS Mojave and later, macOS automatically uses the stack feature to organize all your desktop items. By default, all desktop items are grouped by category. When you click a stack category icon, it will expand all items of this type.
4. Check Desktop in iCloud
Are you using iCloud Drive? When you turn off Desktop and Documents, your files stay in iCloud Drive and a new folder is created on your Mac. You can move files from iCloud Drive to your Mac as you need them, or select all of your files and drag them to the place you want to keep them. Go to Apple menu  -> System Preferences -> iCloud -> iCloud Drive -> Options -> Deselect Desktop & Documents Folders -> Click Done.
5. Recover disappeared desktop items
If all the above methods are tried and still cannot be found, it means that all desktop item has been deleted by some operations. Normal retrieval methods will be useless, here we use Fireebok Data Recovery software to recover the deleted desktop data from the system disk. It supports 5 recovery modes to recover deleted, formatted or lost compute data.
Download and install Fireebok Data Recovery on the computer.
Select the system startup disk, and choose the Deleted Recovery mode.
When the scan is complete, check the desktop folder in the result view, you will find the lost desktop items.
If you can't find the lost desktop items with the Deleted Recovery, back to the product home view, change to another recovery mode, Deep Recovery or Volume Recovery mode.
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