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Can not delete time machine backups in my trash

tennismanclay

tennismanclay

macrumors regular
Original poster
May 11, 2007
221
1
US-Texas
I decided to move my not done backups from time machine to my trash to delete them. Since time machine hasnt been working. I now have them in my trash, yet i can not get rid of them however i try. Here is a screen shot of my trash and what happenes when i try to secure empty trash.

I would really like them gone, considering i now only had 50gb left on my hard drive, rather than 80 or so.



Thanks
 

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was Time Machine just preparing for ages? you should of just left it as it was probably just doing a deep traversal of your backups because found a small error. if you leave it, it will eventually backup.

dont secure empty your trash with all your backups do you have any idea how long that would take! haha.

if a normal empty trash doesnt work try using the Terminal: cd to the trash in your Time Machine drive by typing

Code: 
cd /Volumes/TimeMachineDrive/.Trashes

then delete the folders using sudo permissions by typing.

Code: 
sudo rm -rf [I]name of folder[/I]

then supply your admin password.

do you have anything else on your Time Machine disk? if not it would probably be best if your format it and start again maybe?
 
richthomas said:
was Time Machine just preparing for ages? you should of just left it as it was probably just doing a deep traversal of your backups because found a small error. if you leave it, it will eventually backup.
Click to expand...

i get an error everytime i backup, ive tried since 10.5.2 came out.




and it says operation now permitted on everything i try to delete in my trashes folder on my drive.
rm: /Volumes/TimeMachineDrive/Backups.backupdb/ClayMacbook/2008-03-24-173507.inProgress/5359D2CF-F863-4897-AAC7-DF0ECCA4A32A/Macintosh HD: Operation not permitted

It does that on all of them and at the end it says directory not empty


And im trying to delete them off my computer trash, now my time machine drive trash?
 
my time machine drive

and then my trash
 

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it's gonna take forever to get rid of yout time machine back up by emptying your trash. your best bet is to format your external HD.
 
jcs1088 said:
it's gonna take forever to get rid of yout time machine back up by emptying your trash. your best bet is to format your external HD.
Click to expand...

by formatting you mean deleting everything on it? Cuzz i have like 60 gigs of movies on there... how long would it take to empty my trash, about 40gigs...
 
tennismanclay said:
by formatting you mean deleting everything on it? Cuzz i have like 60 gigs of movies on there... how long would it take to empty my trash, about 40gigs...
Click to expand...

It's going to take a long time to empty your trash. The same thing happened to me and after 10 minutes of waiting it was still in the processes of preparing to empty... It's gonna take a long time either way but if i had to choose I'd rather format the external HD
 
jcs1088 said:
It's going to take a long time to empty your trash. The same thing happened to me and after 10 minutes of waiting it was still in the processes of preparing to empty... It's gonna take a long time either way but if i had to choose I'd rather format the external HD
Click to expand...

if i reformatted i would have to move 70gigs onto my computer, reformat then 70 back onto my hard drive. I dont even think i have 70gb left anymore.
 
jcs1088 said:
i guess the only thing you can do is emptying the trash. the only thing i can think of is to empty it a little bit at a time, if that's even possible. sorry i couldn't help you solve your problem.

EDIT: did a google search and found this tip, hopefully it will help
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071101005330768
Click to expand...



i just tried emptying the trash i let it get to over 9 million files before i canceled it.

the link did not work becuz the files are in my trash, not my hard drive. and when i try to move them to my hard drive it just preparing to copy 6 items. But apparently now they are in my hard drive even with that dialog box still up. i tried that hint and nothing happenes.


so now i have 2 copy's of 6 backups, one in my trash that i cant delete, and now one on my hard drive that i cnt delete.

I'M SCREWED:eek:
 
tennismanclay said:
I decided to move my not done backups from time machine to my trash to delete them. Since time machine hasnt been working. I now have them in my trash, yet i can not get rid of them however i try. Here is a screen shot of my trash and what happenes when i try to secure empty trash.

I would really like them gone, considering i now only had 50gb left on my hard drive, rather than 80 or so.



Thanks
Click to expand...

The exact same thing is happening to me. I have an external 750GB Mybook drive and I am using almost half of it for storage the rest is for my backups. I tried to toss my backup in progress in the trash after several backup attempts failing and now if i try to secure empty trash it just counts files forever (I let it run all day yesterday and last night. It is now up to 45,000,756 files and counting) I have tried just regular empty and it freezes when it gets to about 100,284. I also tried to remove files directly from the backup in progress package and it let me but I still have the same problem when trying to empty the trash. I tried one file at a time and it works until i try to do anything with the backup in progress so there is no doubt that that is the culprit. I tried to rename the backup in progress but it won't let me. It almost acts like it thinks the backup is a never ending space and can't find the end of the files.....if you know what I mean. Anyway, the search continues. I am running 10.5.4
 
So this was interesting. I right clicked on the backup in progress and noticed that the permissions were set to system and staff and everyone as read only except for the system which can also write. I added (Me) to the list and I changed the permissions to read and write and now the in progress file is blinking uncontrollably and no matter how many times I select read and write it will not change and it is still blinking.

I must have hit a nerve :) I hope in some way it kills this damn file.
 
So I tried secure empty trash just for fun and let it run all day. It got up to an unknown number last night and is now down to 41,288,874 files and falling slowly at about 4 files per second. In other words It will take roughly 7,168 days or 19.6 years before this finishes. Hmmmm did I calculate that correctly....
 
Use Disk Utility

I had the same problem. I have a 250GB hard drive, and now am switching computers, and therefore had to delete the Time Machine Backups. I just clicked move to trash but it didn't work. So go into disk utility (under applications/utilities/). Then click on the external you have set up for time machine, then click the erase tab, then erase again. Hope that helps, it worked for me:)
 
runnerboy516 said:
I had the same problem. I have a 250GB hard drive, and now am switching computers, and therefore had to delete the Time Machine Backups. I just clicked move to trash but it didn't work. So go into disk utility (under applications/utilities/). Then click on the external you have set up for time machine, then click the erase tab, then erase again. Hope that helps, it worked for me:)
Click to expand...


You erased your whole drive though. I have Music, Movies, Games etc. on my external with my Time machine backup. I can't just erase the whole thing.
Would be nice though : )

I'm starting to think that having a backup drive that is for backup only might be a good idea.......then I could erase through drive utility and save my self this hassle.
 
Applecoreone said:
You erased your whole drive though. I have Music, Movies, Games etc. on my external with my Time machine backup. I can't just erase the whole thing.
Would be nice though : )

I'm starting to think that having a backup drive that is for backup only might be a good idea.......then I could erase through drive utility and save my self this hassle.
Click to expand...

Don't you have a partition for the Time Machine Backups and another Partition for everything else, couldn't you just format the TM partition?
 
I don't have dual partitions but you could certainly do that. However its not that easy to just erase part of a drive. I don't think disk utility will allow it.
 
I have deleted two '.inProgress' files from my Time Machine hard drive folder, and I'm not able to delete them either.

I've experimented with the sudo command above, but had no luck.
 
When I finally got CS3, I could finally move over to 10.5 that I had on another HD.. but on that HD, I had installed 10.5 months ago and it had made backups even though I wasnt using it after a day or so... so I had to do a clean install onto that other HD. Time machine went to make a backup but there wasnt enough space on the Time Machine HD so I had to delete the previous backups. I tossed it all in the trash.. and it took a while but found like 800,000 files or something. I told it to start deleting and it started but then freaked out and said that files were locked.. so I had to sit there and hit continue on each locked file until it got through all the locked ones. Eventually it worked.
 
use the rm -rf as super-user

I had luck solving this problem by logging in as root (commands are bolded):

[auralox]~ su

and then typing this in terminal:

[root@auralox]$ cd /Volumes/<name of your drive>/.Trashes

then you can do an

[root@auralox]$ ls -la

which will show you the name of the trash directory (in my case 501) which I then deleted using this command

rm -rf 501

which, like the finder 'Empty Trash' command, takes a while, but at least it doesn't screw up and hang forever. Plus, this has the added benefit of NOT having to reformat your drive
 
auralox said:
I had luck solving this problem by logging in as root (commands are bolded):

[auralox]~ su

and then typing this in terminal:

[root@auralox]$ cd /Volumes/<name of your drive>/.Trashes

then you can do an

[root@auralox]$ ls -la

which will show you the name of the trash directory (in my case 501) which I then deleted using this command

rm -rf 501

which, like the finder 'Empty Trash' command, takes a while, but at least it doesn't screw up and hang forever. Plus, this has the added benefit of NOT having to reformat your drive
Click to expand...


Nice Job!
 
Deleting time machine in progress backups from your trash

I had loads of problems with this. I was fiddling around (which is how I get round most computer issues) and

I right clicked on the trash ikon to get it to show me what needed emptying and then I clicked on the in progress backup that would not delete from my computers trash and asked it to show me the package contents.

I double clicked through until I got to two files called boot and bootx both of which were locked.

I pressed apple i to get the info on both these files and unticked the locked box for both files.

I closed the opened package contents window and then emptied trash as normal.

hey presto there was that lovely crunching noise and the file deleted.:eek:

hope that helps someone

Tiptoegirl
 
Hi there, I did try to unlock these files like this but i couldn't get permission. The tick in the box is opaque and won't allow me to touch it. I can't figure out how to do this...and its doing my head in! Any extra help?

Cheers
:apple: Tom
 
HOLE **E** I can't believe no one has posted this.

Select finder from your menu bar.

Select "Empty Trash" while holding down the option key.

Problem solved.

Should take as long as it would normally take to delete a couple of GB. Be patient, it'll do it. If you're deleting like 70GB it's not gonna be done in the blink of an eye.

Personally I think Time Machine is the most retarded thing ever. It'll just keep creating back ups until your external drive is full. There's no preference setting to have it only back up to X amount of data, or control how soon it deletes the back ups. It'd be nice if you could tell it to delete everything older than X amount of days, but you can't. Unless you're constantly working with data that you could potentially lose, it's pointless. The likelyhood that you're going to mess up your mac so bad that you're going to have to do a complete reformat of the drive is so slim that it's not worth giving up that much space on your external to turn time machine on. It's a scam to get you to buy Apple Time Capsule.
 
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