OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Why Can't Delete Old Backups
Jun 26, 2012
My external hard drive holds some of my older archive data, but it also doubles as my time machine backup drive.Â
In an attempt to free up some space on the drive, I tried deleting some older backups. I did this by manually dragging them to the trash.Â
Now the trash will not empty, even a force empty doesn't work. Here's what 've tried so far:Â
1) I tried opening Time Machine prefs and turning it to 'off'.
2) Chose 'none' for 'select disc' in TM prefs, in an effort to 'disconnect' the drive from the machine.
3) Tried 'get info' on the drive and enclosed items, making everything 'read & write'
4) Tried hooking up the drive to another computer: the old backups didn't show up in the trash of that machine, but yet they did show up in the trash of the original machine once i hooked it back up.
5) Tried restarting my computer.
6) Tried force emptying the trash.Â
My Mac is a 2.8GB Quad-Core Intel. Â
I heard another way is to use Terminal, but the problem there is that i don't want to delete ALL the contents of the drive... I just want to delete the older backups which are now in the trash.Â
I have an external HD and have botched up all the time machine backups pretty badly. (deleting backups, adding things to the time machine disk not using a TM backup, etc).Â
I just want to delte everything and start over from scratch.Â
I decided to reinstall Leopard, Erase and Install. Everything runs much faster of course. I'm doing some restoring from my Time Machine HD. I don't want a complete restore, I'm just grabbing folders here and there from my TM HD and restoring it. I'm doing a backup now and so far it has deleted over 20GB of my backups and it doesn't seem to be stopping.
The only way I can see my backups in Time Machine is by using the "option" key and selecting "browse other time macnine disks. However, there is only one Time Machine disk, only one backup appears in the list, there is only one backup directory on the Drobo where I put the backup and I can't find a backup directory anywhere else. HOw do I reset Time Machine so that it defaults to the "other" backup?Â
I get a "sudo: tmutil: command not found" message on terminal when I am trying to inherit backups as per the fantastic instructions on the website by pondini. What does it mean and how can I correct it?Â
My old backups on time machine are not highlighted on time machine so cannot restore them. This is either because I have restored the OS or repaired the external HD used for backups.
Yesterday, I got a disk read error when starting up Windows under Parallels Desktop. After some sleuthing, I found the offending file, and was about to restore from my Time Machine backup when I decided to make sure the disk wasn't going south. I booted off a second, backup, system drive that I keep just for this purpose, and ran aDrive Genius disk scan on the main system drive. All good, only 6Â bad blocks on a 1T drive. I ran this overnight, as it takes an hour or two.Â
This morning, after seeing this result, I booted from the internal system drive, located the offending file again, and entered Time Machine to restore the data. What I found was that ALL of my Time Machine backup data had been deleted. The only data there was a backup from late last night, that WAS FOR THE SECONDARY DRIVE I HAD BOOTED FROM. Seemingly, Time Machine had quietly gone and killed all previous data, and started from scratch backing up my spare drive.Â
There was no warning, no notice, nothing. Over a years worth of backups were gone, and my Parallels installation is now shot, since I can't fix the read problem. I'm contacting Parallels to see if there is any other remedy. You can imagine how absolutely mad I am at this.Â
NOTE:Â
1) I did not touch the backup drive during the boot of the second drive, or the scan test. It was not re-formatted or touched in any way (other than by system software)
In order to use Lion’s encrypted (Core Storage) external drive feature, I needed to reformat an external 1TB drive with Apple Partition Map, as that works only with GPT. The only partition was HFS+J formatted and was used as Time Machine Backup, which I wanted to preserve.Â
Act I:
I connected the drive to another iMac running 10.6 which happened to have enough space on the internal HD. I read this article http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5096 , which describes how to copy the BackupDB just by drag and drop. In hindsight, that was a bad idea, I should have created a disk image like suggested elsewhere, but if Apple itself suggests it, it can’t be so bad right?Â
So I just dragged the whole BackupDB to random folder on the iMac (after enabling ownership), and apparently it copied correctly the dir-hardlinks, as the resulting folder had the same size. Â
It seems that the Finder activates a special dir-hardlink aware copying mode when one does this. This is also confirmed by the fact that the Finder will refuse to copy the BackupDB together with other files, you have to drag and drop the BackupDB only.Â
Act II:
I reformatted the external drive as HFS+J with GPT and activated ownership.. But now, when I try to copy the BackupDB back, it continues to count indefinitely the number of files to copy! I speculate that the special dir-hardlink aware mode is not activated, but what can I do? How can I trigger it? Is there some hidden command line tool which handles this?Â
The lesson I’m drawing from this is: use the method described in the article only if you copy the backupDB from your old to your new drive.Â
My TM backups seem to be proceeding normally on my MBP (which is only sometimes connected to its Time Capsule), but spotlight takes about an hour to index my backup volume each time. Looking at my system.log, I notice that the TM backup volume number is increasing by one each time:Â
[code]...
and so on. Is it normal that the volume name increments each time like this? Could this be related to the long indexing time, which just started recently?
I would like to always have one external hard drive attached to my iMac for Time Machine backups, and another external hard drive off site - periodically swapping the two. The though is that if there is fire or theft, it won't help to have a hard drive onsite attached to the computer, because both the iMac and the hard drive could be lost. Is Time Machine smart enough to allow me to configure two drives, so that whenever I plug in one of the drives, it can figure out what needs to be backed up?
I plan to 'clean up' my Time Machine/Time capsule completely, whereby I want to make it impossible for third parties to recover all or part of these old backups.After I have accompished this I want to start from scratch backing up my Mac.
My external is getting pretty full and was trying to delete some previous backups. I put them in the trash and each time I try to delete them I get error code 8003. I tried using Trash it! but after 12 hours of letting it run nothing was removed. Any ideas of how to empty it?
After carelessly playing with terminal (learned my lesson) I just would like to put the back up files back on my external, which says "can't be done since backup items can't be modified"
Im using a MacBook with OS X 10.6.2 and a Maxtor 1Tb External hdd.
I was running out of space on my External hdd, so decided to turn off time machine and delete all the backups and then do one latest backup and turn it off again, so i turned off time machine and deleted all the backups from the external hdd into the Trash.
I went to deleted the trash and after it prepared to delete some 48,000 files it came up with an error message saying:
"The operation can't be completed because an unexpected error occurred (error code -8003)."
So i researched this, tried a secure empty trash also held down the Option key and emptied the trash and also tried various different Terminal codes (I am nowhere at all competent with Terminal so i was probably doing it wrong).
I've also gone back into time machine and deleted any other backups from with time machine.
None of these have worked, and i have movies, music etc also on the external hdd so a re-format is out of the question.
for some reason, I can no longer delete email in apple mail (v4.5). I can drag it over to the Trash folder, but when I simply click delete, it says a sub-folder within my deleted mail folder "does not allow messages to be moved to it."Â Interestingly there are also two sub-folders within that folder - "on my mac" and the name of my mail account.
I'm lost in trying to delete the backup directories created by Time Machine. I've moved disks around on my network and TIme Machine doesn't seem to remember that it's backed up a given system to a given disk previously, after moving the disk to a different server. So I'm content to start over and I went to /Volumes/Backupdisk/Backups.backupdb and tried 'sudo rm -rf *' to get rid of the existing backups in preparation to start over. It wouldn't let me remove them getting the error 'Operation not permitted'. I note that 'ls -l' shows a lot of rwxr-xr-x@ with the @ sign at the end and I'm assuming that this is a hard link, but I don't know. I'm also thinking this is why rm won't work - multiple hard links?
I really don't want to re-format the disk. BTW I am currently trying to use Time Machine to delete all the file but that is taking FOR EVER and I'm not sure its actually doing anything. Its been about 30 minutes and there's been not reported increase in disk space. Its like its still preparing to delete.
Timemachine is currently using up a lot of my diskspace for silly backups i don't really need. So I tried deleting some files. When I saw you can't just drag the backupthing wherever you want, I did some research. Here I learned you're supposed to go into timemachine and delete the backup through the 'gearsign'. I tried this, but it does not seem to work. My external HD just makes noise, but nothing happens. I tried a really small file (20kb), to check if it was the size that mattered. Nope. It won't even delete that. What am I supposed to do? I have other files on the external HD that I don't want to ruin, that's why i'm not formatting.
I want to upgrade to Snow Leopard and iLife '09, but if I do that, will everything on my computer be deleted or everything that is compatible with snow leopard still work and not be deleted after upgrading? Some details about what happens when you upgrade.
I went to the account tab in preferences but I don't see the guest account. Did this change with Snow Leopard. I want to take the guest account off my laptop.
I am trying to clean up my disk space. I want to know if I can trash old install folders. Ones that show and open box and are followed with the term 'dmg.'
also can I uninstall the older files or folders for the os snow leopard?
Info: MacBook, iOS 5.1, trying to clean up disc space
It seems it should be easy enough to delete a mail account! But I cannot. I highligh the mail account I want to delete, control + click and ONE of the options is DELETE MAILBOX. I have clicked it over and over again, I get a message like "are you sure?" Since I am I select DELETE, not cancel. And I just cannot get rid of this mailbox.Â
I've got several items in my side bar that I can't get rid of. I've tried the CMD-drag and they won't go away. I've also tried deleting from the user library com.apple.finder.plist to no avail.
Info: iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 27" 2.7GHz Intel Core i5 4GB/1TB
I have old addresses that pop up when I type an email. These are contacts in my address book who have changed their email addresses. I want to have only the most current address available. How do I permanently delete the old address?
