Emptying Trash wants to Delete 200,000+ Items

[CaptainCowPie]

I am trying to free up some space on my hard drive, and have tried to empty the Trash. But when I do so, and it says it is preparing to empty the trash, it just keeps adding more files until I finally stop it. I once let it go until it had over 200,000 files it wanted to delete.

It seems to be picking up a lot of these files from my backup drive, a 500GB that I use for Time Machine because I see activity on it when I run this. The only thing I see that may be doing this is an alias called Latest, otherwise I am not sure.

I have run a repair on the external drive to see if it helps, but it didn't seem to do anything.

I am just worried that I may be deleting something important on my main drive that I can't get back. Is there anything I can do to correct this, or is this something that could be normal?

Thanks

 

[netnothing]

It seems to be picking up a lot of these files from my backup drive, a 500GB that I use for Time Machine because I see activity on it when I run this. The only thing I see that may be doing this is an alias called Latest, otherwise I am not sure.

Try moving the Latest alias out of the trash and see if it empties.

The Latest alias is created by Time Machine to point to the latest backup folder. The way TM uses hardlinks, it will essentially follow links to every file that TM has backed up.

Not sure how/why the Latest alias got in the trash, but I'd drag it out and try emptying it.

-Kevin

 

[CaptainCowPie]

Try moving the Latest alias out of the trash and see if it empties.

-Kevin

Kevin,

Thanks for the suggestion. I moved it out to the desktop, but am still getting 100,000+ deletes. I stopped it before it went too far.

It looks like there are two items from previous backups (I think) that I just noticed. One is named:

2008-03-10-004648.inProgress

And the other is similar. But they are about 50GB each! I glanced over them before thinking they were 50MB. I am guessing these are the culprits. Does anyone think there would be a problem deleting then?

Finally, can I just delete one or two items out of trash without affecting the rest?

Thanks again,
Vince

 

[netnothing]

Kevin,

Thanks for the suggestion. I moved it out to the desktop, but am still getting 100,000+ deletes. I stopped it before it went too far.

It looks like there are two items from previous backups (I think) that I just noticed. One is named:

2008-03-10-004648.inProgress

And the other is similar. But they are about 50GB each! I glanced over them before thinking they were 50MB. I am guessing these are the culprits. Does anyone think there would be a problem deleting then?

Finally, can I just delete one or two items out of trash without affecting the rest?

Thanks again,
Vince

That's another Alias to your TM backups. The way TM works with hard links is that if you were to do a Get Info, each folder would report the total amount used because it's linking to the other backed up files.

Try moving all the folders like that out of the trash and see if you can then empty it.

Have you checked.....did TM recreate these aliases on the backup drive? Did it make a new Latest alias?

-Kevin