The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
The Apple Support Community will permanently close on November 20, 2026. Starting today, the site will no longer accept new posts and is available in a read-only state.
You can continue to find trusted guidance and support on the official Apple Support site.
We want to thank the community members who have contributed their time and expertise to help others with their Apple products.
I use a Seagate external drive to store the Time Machine backups and it is filling up. How do I selectively delete the older files? I tried dragging to Trash but they never finish deleting and stay in the trash bin.
iMac 21.5″ 4K, macOS 12.1
Welcome. Disable Time Machine in System Preferences > Time Machine. Open Disk Utility, select the top level of the drive, click Erase, Settings…
The files in the Trash will be gone once you erase the drive.
It's not possible with APFS formatted Time Machine drives. You have to erase the entire drive and start a new backup.
OK, thanks. Can you tell me how to erase it and how to get the files out of Trash that I dragged there?
How do I erase old backup files from an external drive?
