Time Machine Deleteing

[brentg33]

Hi silly question....i have a WD 250gb HD that i used to use for my TM backups...a few months ago i switched and am now using a new HD for my TM backups. Today i went and tried to delete the old TM backup folders from my WD HD and dragged the folder to the trash (the whole folder..backups.backupdb) now im not sure if its all in the trash, cause it still appears on my WD HD as well...when i try to empty the trash, there are over 30.000 files to delete and is says some are locked....is there a way to get rid of all of this ?

 

[toolbox]

If you want a quick way, re partition the drive. That will erase the entire drive including those locked files.

Just make sure before you erase that you don't have critical files on it

 

[brentg33]

well there are lots of files i would like to keep....and how do i get it out of my trash can?

 

[toolbox]

So you just want to erase the time machine backup files only? what files are in the trash that your trying to restore?

 

[brentg33]

yes, i want to get the entire backup folder off the old HD.....i first dragged the entire backup.backupdb folder into my trash can...and its there....but it sill also shows up as a folder on the old HD as well

 

[kolax]

This might help.

 

[pit29]

i first dragged the entire backup.backupdb folder into my trash can...

Shouldn't you have to drag the xxx.sparsebundle-file to the trash, instead of some folders that this disc image contains??

 

[Riemann Zeta]

I've never had a problem deleting the backups.backupd folder. Just make sure that TimeMachine is turned off first (and if you really want to make sure, deselect the disc in the TM control panel), then you can try deleting it from the terminal:

cd /Volumes/[TM_Drive_Name]
sudo rm -rf Backups.backupd

Or, if you put the folder in the trash first:

sudo rm -rf .Trashes