Delete Time Machine Backup with TMUTIL Error

[Billyjb]

I have been using an external Time Machine USB Disk to backup both an older El Capitan drive and a newer larger High Sierra drive in my Mac Pro. Recently the El Capitan drive failed. I no longer need to boot up in El Capitan and I’m trying the recover the space its backups are taking up on my external drive. Since I don’t have the drive anymore I’m trying to use TMUTIL to manually delete the El Capitan backups.

I tried the following command:

billyjb$ sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/MacPro/2018-11-26-201925/EL_Capitan
Password:

But I get the following response:

/Volumes/Backup/Backups.backupdb/MacPro/2018-11-26-201925/EL_Capitan Invalid deletion target (error 22)
Total deleted: 0B

Any thoughts on why I am getting this error? I have SIP disabled.

 

[Brian33]

The man page for tmutil says:
"
delete path ...
Delete one or more snapshots, machine directories, or backup
stores."

I believe that the path you gave was none of those three things. In your path, I think "Backups.backupdb" is a backup store, "MacPro" is a machine directory, and "2018-11-26-201925" is a snapshot. If I understand the man page, you want to delete what is called a backup source -- and apparently the tmutil delete verb won't work on that.

 

[Billyjb]

Thanks for the reply. As I read the tmutil man page backup source is the internal drive I was backing up that crashed. But I believe you are correct it the tm will not delete a file inside a snapshot. In the snapshot directory is the EL_Capitan disk but also two other disks that I still use and backup. I may just define a temporary partition on my largest internal drive and let TM restore EL_Capitan and then use TM to delete the files. It just seems like an awkward workaround for something tmutil should be able to do.