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I went to my Time Machine External HD and deleted one of the backups by dragging it to the trash. Now when I try to empty the trash I keep getting messages that certain folders can't be deleted because they are in use. How do I empty the trash completely? I tried opening the trash and right-clicking on the folder and choosing "Delete Immediately" but it still gives me the message that folder can't be deleted. I'm running High Sierra 10.13.5 on an iMac.

Natsfan
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  • How about turning Time Machine off before nuking a Time Machine backup ? – fd0 Jul 20 '18 at 19:32
  • When you say you "deleted one of the backups", what exactly do you mean? Are you talking about deleting the entire Backups.backupdb folder, one of the per-computer folders inside that (i.e. all backups from a particular computer), one of the timestamped folders inside one of those (i.e. a snapshot), or some file or folder within one of those? – Gordon Davisson Jul 20 '18 at 19:38
  • I wasn't making a backup. My backups are scheduled for after 1:00 am. The backup folder I deleted was about in the middle of my backups. Several months ago. – Natsfan Jul 20 '18 at 19:41
  • @GordonDavisson. Yes. My backups are in a folder named Backups.backupdb. In that folder are several folders named with the date and time of the backup. I moved one of these dated folders into the trash. I was just testing how to delete certain backups. – Natsfan Jul 20 '18 at 19:46
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    In that case, I recommend putting the snapshot back, and then using the "Delete Backup" option within the Time Machine interface. See this previous answer – Gordon Davisson Jul 20 '18 at 21:24
  • Thanks for your help but I can't move folder back into the backup folder. It gives me the message backup items can't be modified! I moved folder out of trash and just moved it onto the Time Machine disk at the same level as Backups.backupdb. – Natsfan Jul 20 '18 at 21:55
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    Are you doing "incremental backups"? If so, you may have effectively trashed all of them - this would be worth checking... – Solar Mike Jul 21 '18 at 07:32
  • It was set to do backups once a week. I'll check if my other backups are there. Thanks. – Natsfan Jul 21 '18 at 13:09
  • @SolarMike My older backups are still there but how do I determine if they are valid. Oh, Backup no longer works after my idiot move. – Natsfan Jul 22 '18 at 16:23
  • I have exactly the same question and same phenomena: can't empty or restore the trash. There are some solutions saying that we have to reformat the backup disk. – Code42 Oct 23 '18 at 22:54

1 Answers1

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Of course the problem only shows when I want to empty my trash and my related Time Machine volume is mounted. When I want to delete my trash, I temporarily unmount the TM Volume. And from now on I will not try to make extra room on my other TM back-up volumes by deleting folders from my Time Machine back-up. I will either let Time Machine automatically delete what is needed when the volume is full, or manually delete data using a method built into the Time Machine software.

grg
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Ganganath
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