How do I delete a time machine backup?

[Jacob Brown]

I had my time machine backup on one external hard drive and had to switch the backup to a different drive. The time machine app on my mac says that the old hard drive is still a backup. When I try to delete it a dialogue box comes up saying "Preparing to Delete Files". It starts counting files and never stops. It got up to 200k files after ten minutes. There must be another way.

Thanks
-Jacob

 

[NoBoMac]

If understanding correctly, there are two different things you need to do.

First, bring up Disk Utility and reformat the drive/volume you no longer want to use. You've now "erased" the drive and the indexes that Time Machine uses.

Now go into Time Machine preferences and remove that volume from the list.

Alternatively, believe you can just remove the volume from Time Machine preferences with the drive unplugged/unmounted: should simply remove that volume as a target.

 

[Jacob Brown]

I guess when I have a time machine backup on an external drive I should use that drive for only the time machine backup. I was using the old time machine backup drive to store videos. I removed the old drive as a target backup drive but it still looks like a time machine backup drive. Its icon is a green drive with a clock and circular arrow on it. I think I will take off all my videos from the old backup drive, reformat it, then put the videos back onto it.

I have a new problem now. I deleted the backups folder and it is now in my recycle bin. I cant delete it. When I try it says preparing to delete forever. I cant move it back to the old drive because it says preparing to copy forever. Is there a program I can use to delete these backup folders?

Thanks for the help

 

[NoBoMac]

Can't remember the specifics, and can't recall if will run into permission issues, but...

The trash for the external volume is kept on the external, not the local trash. The trash can on the dock is basically just a flag that you have something on the external. So, if comfortable with shell commands, can "cd" to the external volume (cd /Volumes/nameofvolumehere). If you do a "ls -a", you will see something like ".Trashes_something". That's the folder with the various Trashes, by user-id. If you go into there, there will be a trash owned by you, where you might be able to do a "rm -rf nameofyourtrashfilehere".

Or do what it sounds like you were going to do, copy off the files you want to keep, reformat. That will wipe out the trash that is there and will toggle the dock's trash can image to empty.