Hi all,
I'm trying to free up space on my WB 2TB external hard drive, and I thought I'd be slick and delete old back ups from 2017. In retrospect, I'm sure there's a better way to do it (and please be kind to a n00b if this is something I should have known would obviously cause problems), but I just went into the Backups.backupdb folder and moved 15 of the old backups to trash. Trying to delete left the empty trash process hanging at "preparing to delete 235,572 files" and required a restart to get out of that.
Now I'm stuck: I can't move the files back to where they came from because I get a "The operation can’t be completed because backup items can’t be modified" error. I can go into individual folders in my trash and force delete them one at a time, but that would take literally forever to finish, and some items claim I can't delete them at all because I don't have access permissions (going into info and changing all permissions to read & write does not help). I get a lot of -8072 errors.
I suppose I could just live with the situation forever and only delete other trash manually, file by file, but I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution.
I'm trying to free up space on my WB 2TB external hard drive, and I thought I'd be slick and delete old back ups from 2017. In retrospect, I'm sure there's a better way to do it (and please be kind to a n00b if this is something I should have known would obviously cause problems), but I just went into the Backups.backupdb folder and moved 15 of the old backups to trash. Trying to delete left the empty trash process hanging at "preparing to delete 235,572 files" and required a restart to get out of that.
Now I'm stuck: I can't move the files back to where they came from because I get a "The operation can’t be completed because backup items can’t be modified" error. I can go into individual folders in my trash and force delete them one at a time, but that would take literally forever to finish, and some items claim I can't delete them at all because I don't have access permissions (going into info and changing all permissions to read & write does not help). I get a lot of -8072 errors.
I suppose I could just live with the situation forever and only delete other trash manually, file by file, but I'm hoping there's a more elegant solution.