I was trying to make room in my Time Machine back-up disk and I moved some files to the trash. Now I cannot delete or move them. What can I do?
iMac (21.5-inch Mid 2010), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)
The answer depends on exactly what you did to delete the files.
In general, it is not advisable to delete Time Machine backups using the Finder. Time Machine works in conjunction with Spotlight to organize Time Machine backups. Deleting files required Spotlight to work overtime, and it is possible that this action corrupted its database.
If this happened, it is fixable.
Read the following, courtesy of Apple Support Communities contributor Pondini:
Scroll down to the grey box for a potential fix.
And see his response to a similar thread some time ago;
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2638549?start=0&tstart=0
Thanks for the advice. I found another post that suggested I empty the trash while holding the Option key - and it worked!
I moved some time machine back-ups to the trash and I cannot move or delete them?
