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Cant find my design file

  • August 25, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 31 views

Tunmise

i recently moved a design from projects to trash and now i cant seem to find it anywhere not even in the trash folder

Best answer by Gayani_S

Hey ​@Tunmise, thanks for reaching out!

When you move a file to trash, it should land in the Trash section of the file browser, but trash is tied to the specific team it came from. If you're part of more than one team or organization in Figma (pretty common if you've got your own personal team plus one connected to your school), each one has its own separate trash. So a file trashed in one team won't show up while you're looking at another team's trash.

A couple of things worth checking:

  1. Look for a dropdown arrow next to your team name in the sidebar. If you have access to more than one team, you can switch between them and check the trash for each one.
  2. Once you're in the right trash, check both the Files and Folders tabs, if the whole folder the file was in got moved to trash along with it, it'll show up under Folders rather than Files.

If you've been through both of those and it's still nowhere to be found, the two remaining possibilities are that the entire team it was in was deleted (files won't show up in Trash again until the team itself is restored, within 28 days of deletion), or that the file's already been permanently deleted by someone else with access to it.

You can find more detail on all of this in our Delete and restore files article.

Could you let me know whether this design lived in your own Drafts or inside a shared team folder, and whether you're part of more than one team in Figma? That'll help me point you to exactly the right spot to look.

1 reply

Gayani_S
Figmate
  • Community Support
  • Answer
  • August 25, 2026

Hey ​@Tunmise, thanks for reaching out!

When you move a file to trash, it should land in the Trash section of the file browser, but trash is tied to the specific team it came from. If you're part of more than one team or organization in Figma (pretty common if you've got your own personal team plus one connected to your school), each one has its own separate trash. So a file trashed in one team won't show up while you're looking at another team's trash.

A couple of things worth checking:

  1. Look for a dropdown arrow next to your team name in the sidebar. If you have access to more than one team, you can switch between them and check the trash for each one.
  2. Once you're in the right trash, check both the Files and Folders tabs, if the whole folder the file was in got moved to trash along with it, it'll show up under Folders rather than Files.

If you've been through both of those and it's still nowhere to be found, the two remaining possibilities are that the entire team it was in was deleted (files won't show up in Trash again until the team itself is restored, within 28 days of deletion), or that the file's already been permanently deleted by someone else with access to it.

You can find more detail on all of this in our Delete and restore files article.

Could you let me know whether this design lived in your own Drafts or inside a shared team folder, and whether you're part of more than one team in Figma? That'll help me point you to exactly the right spot to look.