Deleting Time Capsule Backup Files

[illegalprelude]

Hey everybody, so I've recently had my iMac, MBP and MB in the house all backup to our 2TB Time Capsule. Seeing how I do a ton of media on the iMac, it didn't make sense to bog down the TC so I've now plugged a 2TB external WD drive for backing up.

The issue now is that I've connected to my TC via Finder and navigated to my iMacs backup file and have been trying to delete for nearly 2 days now with little done. I think the status bar has moved ever so slightly. The iMac is plugged into the TC so it's not trying to do this wirelessly (the backup file is nearly 850GB). Any thoughts on how I can get rid of this data?

 

[Brian33]

The issue now is that I've connected to my TC via Finder and navigated to my iMacs backup file and have been trying to delete for nearly 2 days now with little done. I think the status bar has moved ever so slightly. The iMac is plugged into the TC so it's not trying to do this wirelessly (the backup file is nearly 850GB). Any thoughts on how I can get rid of this data?

Wow, I thought I'd read it can take a long time, but 2 days! I was curious about your question so I looked around a bit. According to Should I delete old backups? If so, How? (Pondini), one shouldn't use Finder to delete TM backups unless you're running Lion...

I gather that you now back up your iMac to a separate external drive, and so didn't need the iMac backups on the TC and want to free up the space. I think I'd probably use AirPort Utility to erase the TC's disk and start over, backing up the two portable machines over again.

 

[skorpien]

Another thing to consider in addition to Brian33's suggestion is to copy the files of the backups for the portable computers temporarily to another drive before erasing the Time Capsule. Once the erase is complete, copy those two files back to the drive and you should be able to continue the backups from those two files. The first time you back up the portables, it may need to verify the backups prior to completing the first backup but it should work like it did before afterwards.

 

[illegalprelude]

Those are great suggestions you guys. I'll probably do the copy over method (even though there is about another 1TB of info to bring over, still sounds faster). To give you an idea, I'm on day 4 now, directly wired to my TC and my iMac is a 27" i7 3.2GHZ with 12GB of ram so it's not lacking in computing power to find and destroy those files.

But wow, this seems like a ridiculous issue