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- #Delete time machine backup mac trash how to
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I type in the password for the external drive and hit enter…Īnd nothing happens. Upon hitting enter, Terminal politely writes back: “Password:”. “Sudo rm -rf /Volumes/My\ Passport\ for\ Mac/.Trashes/501/Backups.backupdb/“
#Delete time machine backup mac trash code
This line of code will override any protections of the folder and obliterate it. I take the pathway for my folder, and I enter “sudo rm -rf ” prior to it to delete everything in that folder. Now I know exactly where the backups.backupdb folder exists, and the user account where I had placed MAIN in the past is actually a weird way of writing my multiword name for my external drive: My Passport for Mac.
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“/Volumes/My\ Passport\ for\ Mac/.Trashes/501/Backups.backupdb/*” In my next attack, I decide to get the path name of the trash folder by dragging the backups.backupdb folder from the trash and into terminal. A folder in the trash stood between me and success.
#Delete time machine backup mac trash free
This was the last step after I had painstakingly combed through, purged, and organized 1000’s of files on this drive to free up space. I plan how the next day will not be spent doing all the fun things but achieving victory against one little folder…taking up many gbs of space on my external hard drive. I’m frustrated and a challenge has been initiated. I go to sleep that night thinking about why I can’t delete these files. I hit enter, and the files are still there. If you don’t designate a specific file, it will delete everything on your entire computer. It will delete everything in that file, and everything beneath it as well. Note: rm - rf is a command you never ever ever want to enter into Terminal without a designated file following. I’m going to delete anything and everything in the trash folder on my user account MAIN, which is where the offending backups.backupdb file rests. I have basic knowledge in coding and feel comfortable working in Terminal. It originally stood for "superuser do" as the older versions of sudo were designed to run commands only as the superuser.” Wikipedia describes the sudo command as the following: “is a program for Unix-like computer operating systems that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user, by default the superuser. “Sudo” essentially tells the computer I can do what I want. states “The “rm” tells the computer to remove the r deletes everything within a given directory and the f stands for “force”, telling the computer to ignore the usual warnings that come when deleting files.” The -f argument stands for "force." It will ignore nonexistent files and never prompt.” Nothing happens when I hit enter, so I type inĪ states “The -r argument stands for "recursive." It will remove what you ask, as well as all files and directories underneath it.
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There are hundreds and hundreds of hidden folders on computers that house the folders we known and love. Trashes folder should be a hidden numbered folder which contains your trash folder. I want to identify the trash folder on this account, where the Backups.backupdb folder shows up only when my external drive is connected. MAIN is the username of the administrator account on my computer. I turn to google and find no answers and a lot of pained souls.įinally, at the advisement of osXdaily, I thought I had found the answer. I try manually deleting the folder, no luck. I plug it back in, and there are the Backup folders. I unplug the external drive and the trash appears empty. The Backups.backupdb folder is still glaring at me. I click “empty trash” and see the trash emptying progress counting thousands of backup folders among many more. I dragged said innocent file into the trash and after a million years of transferring, it had met it’s final resting place. Fast forward a few years to when the drive started to fill up, and at the same time, I discovered a cloud backup service I could use instead of an external drive (read here for my review of Backblaze ??.) I no longer needed my Time Machine backups, innocently resting as a Backups.backupdb folder on my external drive. Over time, I began to put other files on the same drive because it was convenient and I could store old photos there that were accessed infrequently and taking up room on my computer’s hard drive. It began with an external drive I had purchased to store time machine backups of my Mac. Help is here…this story has a good ending.
#Delete time machine backup mac trash how to
Enter stage left, my 3 day saga of frustration and reading everything I could find online on how to do this, to no avail. This post is for all the desperate people with time machine backups in the trash that they can’t delete.