Time Machine, Trash and Emptying thereof

[sgtbob]

I just bought a new 27” iMAC, attached the old Time Machine external HDD to it and ‘Restored’ the latest backup from my old 9-year old machine which had died. Everything went well on the restore’ feature. Unfortunately, when the scheduled backup to the Time Machine came due, it indicated that only 14 GB of storage remained and it would not automatically back-up.

I’ve checked the System Preferences and the data on the Time Machine indicates it should be deleting the oldest backup when the unit is full.

After trying various repairs through the Disk Utility, I thought (bummer) that I would simply ‘highlight’ the backups on the Time Machine over a year old, move them to the Trash can and then delete them. This I did, but when I tried to empty the trash can via ‘delete immediately’, the unit ran for 24 hours and continued ‘calculating sizes of Trash Folders…’. Thinking there must be a glitch, I stopped the backup and then tried with my ‘Clean MyMAC 3’ program. I selected the ‘trash bins’ as the item to clean – it has now been running for over 28 hours and appears to show only about a ¼ being in the ‘found’ arena.

At this rate, it will take something approaching 120 hours to acquire and show ‘Found….TB’ and who know how many to ‘erase’ this humongous amount of data.

Question – is there any way to delete this trash more rapidly or easier when the volume of data in the trash can is detected as so large?

 

[keysofanxiety]

Thinking there must be a glitch, I stopped the backup and then tried with my ‘Clean MyMAC 3’ program.

I'll stop you there. Get rid of that application. Drag it from the Applications folder into AppCleaner and delete all files found. AppCleaner can be downloaded here: https://freemacsoft.net/downloads/AppCleaner_3.3.zip

Run a scan through MalwareBytes: https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac-download/

Once you've done that, restart your Mac with reopen windows when logging back in disabled/unticked. Then try empty the Trash normally by right-clicking it and selecting 'Empty Trash'.

 

[antonis]

You can always use command line and "rm" command - as long as you know what you're doing. Erasing something from command line will delete it immediately without the intervention of Trash (and without the option to undo the operation). The contents of Trash itself can also be deleted that way (e.g. invoking "rm -rf ./mydir" will delete immediately the folder "mydir" along with its included files & subfolders without going to Trash).

However, when Time Machine is in context, I'm not sure you are supposed to delete anything. Even older backup directories might have links on files that haven't changed and are still on the original version, so it might not be a good idea to delete it at first place. Whatever you do, just make sure your Time Machine backup is not corrupted and works as it should.

In the worst case, you can always format the TM drive and take a new full Time Machine backup immediately, so you have at least a restore point for your current machine.

 

[sgtbob]

I'll stop you there. Get rid of that application. Drag it from the Applications folder into AppCleaner and delete all files found. AppCleaner can be downloaded here: https://freemacsoft.net/downloads/AppCleaner_3.3.zip

Run a scan through MalwareBytes: https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac-download/

Once you've done that, restart your Mac with reopen windows when logging back in disabled/unticked. Then try empty the Trash normally by right-clicking it and selecting 'Empty Trash'.

I tried the method suggested; however, when I hit the 'Empty Trash', the 'processing to empty trash...' began and after some 10-15 minutes, the 'items to delete' has now passed 1, 200,000 and increasing. This appears to be the same issue I had with my feeble attempts with 'Empty Trash' and 'Clean MyMac 3'.

BTW https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac-download/ comes iup with a 404 not found.

 

[keysofanxiety]

BTW https://www.malwarebytes.com/mac-download/ comes iup with a 404 not found.

It shouldn't do... try the direct download link: https://store.malwarebytes.com/342/purl-mbamm-dl

Let's force empty the Trash, see if that does the trick. Open Terminal and type in sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash/*

This will prompt for your user password. Please be aware that it won't show the characters as you type them, so you'll have to enter in your password blind and press Enter on your keyboard.

 

[BrianBaughn]

From the description it sounds possible that your new iMac has not "inherited" the old backup and it starting fresh with a new set of backups. If that's the case it wouldn't delete the oldest backup because it thinks those backups are from a different machine.

I don't know if what you've done has messed up the possibility of making TM inherit the old set of backups.

Anyway, read here http://pondini.org/TM/B6.html .

 

[sgtbob]

You can always use command line and "rm" command - as long as you know what you're doing. Erasing something from command line will delete it immediately without the intervention of Trash (and without the option to undo the operation). The contents of Trash itself can also be deleted that way (e.g. invoking "rm -rf ./mydir" will delete immediately the folder "mydir" along with its included files & subfolders without going to Trash).

However, when Time Machine is in context, I'm not sure you are supposed to delete anything. Even older backup directories might have links on files that haven't changed and are still on the original version, so it might not be a good idea to delete it at first place. Whatever you do, just make sure your Time Machine backup is not corrupted and works as it should.

In the worst case, you can always format the TM drive and take a new full Time Machine backup immediately, so you have at least a restore point for your current machine.

I'm a bit reluctant to impose the "rm -rf ./mydir" for lack of my understanding what may occur.

Regarding the second paragraph, when I drill down to the backups in the Time Machine, and right click, there is a provision to delete the backup. Thus far I have not tried it but will do so.

I'm thinking that if I do a 'cmd + R' on start up, I could at least restore the system to a backup from the time Machine. I'll have to think on this a bit.

Thanks to all who responded.

 

[thomasareed]

After trying various repairs through the Disk Utility, I thought (bummer) that I would simply ‘highlight’ the backups on the Time Machine over a year old, move them to the Trash can and then delete them.

Unfortunately, by doing this, you have absolutely trashed your Time Machine backups on that drive. I would not count on being able to repair those backups, and if you do think that you've repaired them, I certainly wouldn't count on that as your only backup. That would set you up for failure down the road, if you really needed your backups and only then discovered they really weren't fixed.

My advice would be to erase the backup drive using Disk Utility and start all over again. Alternately, get another hard drive and start a new set of backups. And if it's your only backup, do one of these things ASAP, since you're really without backups at all at the moment.

 

[johannarg]

Hello, I am trying to delete a Backups.backupdb folder on my Trash. I have seen the Terminal instructions but I don't have a TM drive anymore, I no longer use it. Any ideas how to empty it without an assigned TM backup drive?

 

[sgtbob]

I finally got rid of the old backup drive, bought a new 2 TB Seagate about a two months ago and started over. The first issue was to do a full backup and the new unit has worked fine ever since.