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Apple not helping... deleting Time Machine snapshots

Having recently gotten a new Mac, I decided I didn't need all the backups in Time Machine from my previous Mac. Being a good Mac user, I dragged all the snapshots I didn't want to keep to the Trash.


Silly me! It seems this won't work for deep mysterious Steve-Jobbish Apple reasons. OK, I respect that.


But then, Apple... couldn't you PLEASE alert me that this won't work? Now I have a trash folder on my external hard drive that is stuck, won't work, can't be deleted. Lots of complicated ways to get rid of these, using Terminal, and scary-looking commands, pop up on the web, but that's not reassuring.


I get alerts from my Mac for the darnedest reasons. Why not for this, that actually is a violation of the Mac interface ("to throw things away, put them in the Trash"), and that causes messy problems???


If anyone does know how to delete the files now stuck in Trash, I'd be grateful.

iMac 27″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Nov 24, 2020 3:13 PM

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Posted on Nov 25, 2020 9:38 AM

In the future if you want to delete all backups of a particular item or folder enter Time Machine, located the item, Control (right) - click on it and select "Delete all backups of XXXX" from the contextual menu.


Once started you can then click on the Cancel button to leave Time Machine and let it continue deleting as it will take a while.


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Nov 25, 2020 9:38 AM in response to PQuincy

In the future if you want to delete all backups of a particular item or folder enter Time Machine, located the item, Control (right) - click on it and select "Delete all backups of XXXX" from the contextual menu.


Once started you can then click on the Cancel button to leave Time Machine and let it continue deleting as it will take a while.


Nov 24, 2020 4:35 PM in response to PQuincy

PQuincy wrote:

And yet Apple can't program an alert when I follow the standard GUI in dragging folders to the trash. Astonishing!


It has never been advised to tamper with the Time Machine files in the Finder ( your "standard GUI" )

The only interaction should be through the Time Machine interface itself—Restore feature.


Time Machine does best if you let it manage the data.



Please submit your Apple Feedback http://www.apple.com/feedback

Nov 24, 2020 4:39 PM in response to leroydouglas

"It has never been advised to tamper..." Well, perhaps if I spent my time memorizing technical manuals. But the promise of the Apple GUI and environment is that it is relatively intuitive. An accessory to being intuitive is that if, for perfectly legitimate technical reasons, some part of the UI does not follow the rest, your Mac will gently warn you away if you try to do what would usually work... say, getting rid of unneeded files by putting them in the Trash.


Again: I'm not complaining that Time Machine files need different treatment. I'm complaining that Apple was unable to develop an alert that would either prevent me from doing something that just required me to delete the backups of an older machine that I actually wanted to keep, or at least give me an alert that my action was not recommended.


Instead, my Finder happily moved the Time Machine files to the Trash, and when I selected Empty Trash, it happily got to work, saying it was "deleting files".... except that it wasn't. The problem here is not Time Machine.


And the lovely snippet you copied, which I've also read, of course, does not explain what to do when I spend my hard-earned cash with Apple to buy a new machine. I would actually like an old backup, but don't need the hourly/daily/weekly for the past 5 years any more. Thus it seemed perfectly reasonable to get rid of a lot of snapshots... and the Finder let me do it (or at least, performed the illusion of allowing me).


Read my post: I'm only asserting that an alert would be appropriate, not that what I did has to work!

Apple not helping... deleting Time Machine snapshots

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