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Empty the trash

I have been using my external drive to backup my Macbook. The backups finally used up all of the 2 TB of storage on my external drive so I deleted older versions of the backups which amounted to approximately 900 GB of trash. I've been trying to empty the trash. The effort is taking over a day and the status image says more than 120,000 items have been deleted. And it's still going.


Any insight as to what is happening? I'm running latest version of Ventura.

MacBook Air 13″, macOS 13.3

Posted on May 10, 2023 9:05 AM

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Posted on May 10, 2023 9:09 AM

Your Mac is deleting 900 GB of files of all different sizes. Depending on the speed of your external drive and the size of the 120,000 items being deleted, it sounds like your Mac may have days left to go before it is completed emptying the trash.


To be clear, everything is likely functioning as intended -- reading and re-writing large amounts of data on a hard drive can take a long time.

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May 10, 2023 9:09 AM in response to Staynavytom

Your Mac is deleting 900 GB of files of all different sizes. Depending on the speed of your external drive and the size of the 120,000 items being deleted, it sounds like your Mac may have days left to go before it is completed emptying the trash.


To be clear, everything is likely functioning as intended -- reading and re-writing large amounts of data on a hard drive can take a long time.

May 18, 2023 9:00 AM in response to dialabrain

Reformating is a good option, except that I have over 1 TB of other data that I would need to transfer to yet another drive.


BTW, it's been over a week since I started emptying the trash. What happens if I quit emptying the trash? Will the more than 1.4 million files that have been deleted really be deleted from my external drive and my trash bin?

May 18, 2023 9:16 AM in response to dialabrain

I followed another wizard's advice to backup to an external hard drive because backing up to iCloud filled the storage there. I now don't back anything up. Any files I think are special, I keep in my iCloud drive.


Can you or anyone following this discussion thread tell me the difference between skipping a deletion stoppage versus continuing the deletion? Frequently the deletion process will stop because the file it's trying to delete is being used in another app. I get the option to cancel, skip or continue with the deletion.

Jul 8, 2023 10:39 AM in response to Staynavytom

Just for closure in case someone else has this issue. I finally bought more space on my iCloud drive and transferred the files I wanted to keep from my external drive to my iCloud drive. Then I reformatted the external drive to eliminate the backup files. I did this after six weeks of trying to delete the backup files. It took only a week or so to transfer my "keeper" files to iCloud. I now see no need for me to backup my Macbook. Any file I want to keep secure and safe, I add to my iCloud drive.

Empty the trash

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