The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8072).

[WaxLily]

My son crashed my mac by running Steam gaming software and it snowballed into a bunch of issues; I've rebooted the machine twice, but the initial freezing interrupted one of my Time Machine backups and now I'm having great difficulty getting TM to run as it's hung up on 'preparing'. So I did something that I now know was foolish which was throwing one of my backups into trash thinking the space on the drive might have gotten tight if there were unfinished backups or something. SO, now I do have TM running (it took well over 30 minutes though to do a deep preparation) and while that's running, I now have this MASSIVE (I mean, 2,000+ files) TM Backup in the trash that I can't get rid of.

Tried some suggested terminal commands from various google searches, of course tried force-deleting the trash, etc. When you try to simply empty the trash in the typical fashion you get the error : The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8072).

I tried replacing the backup from trash to the same place on backup drive with no success.

What else can I do? Anyone have any other ideas?

(6 minutes left on new backup, fingers crossed there is no hiccup here, problem 1 of 2 will then be solved).

Thanks everyone!

 

[Boyd01]

What else can I do? Anyone have any other ideas?

Not exactly sure what needs to be done to fix the problem on your time machine disk, but I know what I would do: get another external hard drive and do a full backup to it so that you *know* you have a good, current one. Actually, I'd get two new drives and use Carbon Copy Cloner to also make a bootable clone. If you had an up-to-date clone when you first experienced this problem, it would have been very simple to repair.

 

[MysticCow]

sudo rm, perhaps?

 

[WaxLily]

sudo rm, perhaps?

Tried that with no luck But going to try again ty!
[doublepost=1502281972][/doublepost]

Not exactly sure what needs to be done to fix the problem on your time machine disk, but I know what I would do: get another external hard drive and do a full backup to it so that you *know* you have a good, current one. Actually, I'd get two new drives and use Carbon Copy Cloner to also make a bootable clone. If you had an up-to-date clone when you first experienced this problem, it would have been very simple to repair.

Boyd1 thanks for taking the time! I was able to repair the disk and backups are performing as normal now. But for the future, you recommend keeping a second clone of my backup disc at all times?

The remaining issue I am having is with the trash. I did not realize trashing the backup would be such a mistake; Cannot get the trash to empty now. Error
-8072

 

[Boyd01]

I think you would need to use rm -Rf to really delete everything. The "f" option forces deletion and the "R" option recursively goes through folders. But be very careful, not a good idea to mess with this kind of powerful shell command if you don't know what you're doing.
[doublepost=1502282449][/doublepost]

But for the future, you recommend keeping a second clone of my backup disc at all times?

Personally I keep three current backup copies, plus several old archived versions from whenever I have updated MacOS to a new version or purchased a new computer. For current backups I have

1 - Airport Time Capsule that is constantly backing everything up in real time
2 - Time machine external disk that I keep offsite
3 - Carbon copy clone that I keep stashed in a different part of the house

I live in a rural area and have only been able to get very slow DSL internet for the past 11 years. Last month Verizon ran 800 feet of fiber down my driveway and I now have really fast 150/150mbit FIOS. So I'm also going to look into cloud backup options to supplement these disks.

Just ask yourself how important your data is and how much of a problem it would be if it all went away forever.

 

[WaxLily]

I do not know what I'm doing in regard to shell commands. Thanks for the tip, I'll try to find someone to help me with the trash problem I guess.

I'm gonna take that advice and store a carbon copy clone in addition to my TM backups. Especially now with my trash problems. Thanks.