In complete ignorance I simply tried, on my back up drive, to delete quite a few older backups. when I went to trash to purge them I get messages that say 'cannot delete, file (or) folder is in use'. I recognize that i created this issue, but is there a way to convince the Mac that I really can delete these? How to stop the Mac from 'using' these files/folders so they can be purged?
SOLVED How To Completely Delete Old Backup Folders
- Thread starter Carl Ash
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Assuming that the “back up drive” is a Time Machine backup, it’s no wonder that you are having these problems. I don’t know why Apple does not prevent direct access to the files in a Time Machine backup because these files have links that should not be messed with using Finder. The only solution I can think of at this point is to erase that drive with Disk Utility and start over—now armed with the knowledge that you just found.
I always maintain at least two Time Machine drives concurrently. Time Machine is supposed to dispose of old files when the drives start to fill up. I usually don’t even wait for this to happen. In stead, the “old” drive gets replaced with a new one, or simply reformatted knowing that a second one is there as back up. It’s also good to familiarize yourself with how to restore/replace files using the Time Machine app. It’s also not recommended to restore files directly using Finder.
Hey Tony!!
Thanks for sure for getting back to me. Can I summarize by saying that if I wipe Time Machine (Yes it was) drive that I can then clean the folders from 'Trash'?? That's a fairly straight forward fix and the backup of the backup has been a strategy I've used for years but more on the photo/movie type files.
If you'd confirm my understanding I'd be very grateful!
Thanks again!!
Thanks for sure for getting back to me. Can I summarize by saying that if I wipe Time Machine (Yes it was) drive that I can then clean the folders from 'Trash'?? That's a fairly straight forward fix and the backup of the backup has been a strategy I've used for years but more on the photo/movie type files.
If you'd confirm my understanding I'd be very grateful!
Thanks again!!
Hey Tony,
Once again thanks! It all made sense so I went ahead and did it. It was a brute force method, but it worked!!!
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Nice! Let me share some info, if you don’t mind. I always keep two Time Machine drives which alternate backing up about every hour. I never look into those drives except out of curiosity, I wanted to have an idea of the file structure. Surprisingly, they looked exactly like regular Finder items. But all those files and folders are linked together and are solely controlled by the Time Machine app.
For redundancy I use a cloning app to make copies of folders or volumes which can be accessed the way you started out—by having direct access to particular items in Finder. But the beauty of Time Machine for me is if I need to restore a file, for example, that I had resaved but I want to get at the version that I was working with, say, this morning. I can even choose the approximate time. And this happens to me a lot because the kind of data I work with are usually saved and resaved every few minutes or so. You can only do such restores with Time Machine.
In short, if you understand and appreciate the tools you have available to you, it will help you to come up with storage/backup strategies to serve you best. By the way, if you are running macOS with the system/data partition scheme, you will do best to format your Time Machine drives as APFS. (I think it started with Catalina.)
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But... What do you do when your external Time Machine drive needs to be replaced, but you want to keep as much of the past history as you can?
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Nothing much can be done except to get very large drives. I have two 8-TB drives make backups every hour all day. On the average, with the amount of data I have on all the other drives, the Time Machine drives can maintain, on the average, 12–18 months of backups. If you have older files that you want to preserve indefinitely, you need an archive strategy. To some extent I do that to my older data, by making archives on to more large hard drives that are fired up only when you are doing archiving. I have about 15 years’ worth of old data that I preserve to this day, even though I know that I will probably need to retrieve less than 10% of it.
For a while, I had archives done on tape until I later found out that tape does not last as long as hard drives. There can be payoffs. I recently retrieved typesetting data for several old publications that the author wanted to update. The original looks were done more than a dozen years ago. Otherwise, we would have had to scan all those pages from the printed books.
Anyway, the short answer is, the more data you want to keep, the larger your Time Machine drives need to be. When they get full, just buy a new set to start anew. I still stay with 8-terabyte drives because the newer, larger units are not as long-lived as the 8s. Go to bacblaze.com to read their report on Hard Drive Life Expectancy.