In 2015 I told Time Machine to start backing itself up on my external drive. Now i want to delete the Time Machine files attached to my drive, but Time Machine doesen't recognize that it's there. It's taking up approximately 500gb of storage. How do I delete these files?
MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.11
In Finder window, navigate to the external drive and select the Backups.backupdb file and drag it to the trash. Then empty the trash.
If the only thing on the drive is Time Machine backup files, then you can use Disk Utility to erase the drive.
If the drive also contains other files in addition to the TM backups, you can copy those to another drive device then erase the drive and copy your files back to it.
In Finder window, navigate to the external drive and select the Backups.backupdb file and drag it to the trash. Then empty the trash.
If the only thing on the drive is Time Machine backup files, then you can use Disk Utility to erase the drive.
If the drive also contains other files in addition to the TM backups, you can copy those to another drive device then erase the drive and copy your files back to it.
Time Machine can't recognize it's own files on my external drive
