Cannot regain storage after deleting multiple backups on WD Passport

Webbsk8r wrote:

This is a second posting for clarity. My external WD Ultra Passport external drive won’t release space after deleting several large Backup files.

Is this disk used as Time Machine backups or some other backup method?

How were these backups deleted?

If you just did drag and drop to trash and it is a Time Machine backup, that is likely one reason space is not actually freeing up space because time machine backups are not the actual files themselves but snapshots of changes in files with bookkeeping for those changes. The Time Machine backups can be removed properly in Disk Utility or from the command line using Terminal. But if you have already done a drag and drop to trash, you may have messed up the ability to do that now.

I want to use the drive to start backing up my MAC M1 before I upgrade to Sonoma but I still have the IMAC 27” that the remaining backup belongs to - does anybody have any ideas?

If you want a Time Machine backup of your iMac and a backup of the MacMini, you really need a drive for each or erase and the current drive and make two partitions and start new Time Machine backups for both. With the drive being 1 TB and depending on how big the two drives are on the Macs, you will more than likely need two drives.

Webbsk8r wrote:

This is a second posting for clarity. My external WD Ultra Passport external drive won’t release space after deleting several large Backup files. Drive is 1TB and it keeps showing 51.1 GB available no matter how many backups I delete and I do NOT want to erase the entire disk as I need the one backup that I still have left. I can’t transfer that file either as I get format incompatibility messages.

Did you manually moved Time Machine backups to the trash?

If so, then that whole backup set is borked and you need to erase the external drive and start new backups.

I want to use the drive to start backing up my MAC M1 before I upgrade to Sonoma but I still have the IMAC 27” that the remaining backup belongs to - does anybody have any ideas?

If you are keeping the 27" iMac?

Then it is best to use two external drives.

One external drive for backing up the 27" iMac.

Then a second external drive for backing up the M1 Mac mini.

If you only want to backup the M1 Mac mini?

Then you need to erase that external drive and start new backups for the M1 Mac mini.

+1