I've mistakenly deleted Time Machine backups from my external HDD. How do I fix this?!

I manually deleted several Time Machine backups from my external HDD. Whenever I attempt to empty trash, it states (error code -22) has occurred. How do I fix my predicament?
I understand (now) that I should never do this and ONLY delete from the Time Machine app itself but I did not assume this would be so complex by taking a blind stab at it. How do I either a) place the Time Machine backups where the originated (Put Back is not an option when right-clicked) or b) successfully delete these so I can clear my bin.
I am running Mac OS 10.10 on a 13" MacBook Air (mid-2013) w/ 4GB of RAM and 128GB SSD. My external drive is a 5400 RPM WD USB 2.0 External Hard Drive.

Try Trash won't empty deleted time machine backups

Similar Messages

  • How can I delete time machine backups from my external hard rive

    My 2 TB hardrive is starting to fill up, so i went to check on what is taking all the space up, aparently time machine has use 321.90GB of space on my hardrive.
    if it is possible I want to be able to delete a couple of backups but if i cant delete a couple of backups then i would not mind to delete all of the backups.
    Thankyou

    Time Machine manages space automatically. You should not delete snapshots yourself. You also should not use the backup drive for anything but backups. If there are non-backup files on the drive, move them to another drive (which must also be backed up.)

  • I threw out 24 time machine backups from an external hard drive into my desktop trash and now I can't empty my trash.

    I threw out 24 time machine backups from an external hard drive into my IMac desktop trash and now I can't empty my trash.

    Since you didn't mention what type of error message you were seeing, I'm going to guess on what is happening.
    I'm guessing that since you threw away Time Machine backups, that Time Machine is probably active on your Mac. There is a chance then that the files you tossed are marked as in use. You can't delete files that are in use.
    Try turning Time Machine off, then restart your Mac. Then try deleting them again.
    Once done, turn Time Machine back on.
    Tom

  • I had to reformat my OSX 10.5.8 and i can't restore my emails from my time machine backup from an external hard drive - only the latest (post backup) time machine back ups are available to restore. Please can any help

    I had to reformat my OSX 10.5.8 and I can't restore my emails from my time machine backup from an external hard drive - only the latest (post backup) time machine back ups are available to restore. Please can any help? I can find the mail folder in my libraries, but the Restore Button is grayed out

    OSX treats the reformatted drive as a different one; it's the same as replacing it, and the old one is no longer connected.
    See #E3 in  Time Machine - Troubleshooting to see and restore from the "old" drive.
    And, you may not want to restore via the Finder; see the blue box in #15 of  Time Machine - Frequently Asked Questions.

  • Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

    Is there a way to get my photos off an old time machine backup from an external hard drive?

    You will have to connect the Time Machine HDD and click on the Icon.  You will see one folder called Backups.backupdb.  Click on that and you will have to continue until you find the home folder.  The iPhoto library (where the pictures are, not the application) will probably be in your pictures folder.  You will have to drag that to your desk top.  Then you will have access to individual images.
    Ciao.

  • How to delete Time Machine backups from Trash

    OK, so you deleted Time Machine backups via Finder and now you can't delete them from Trash.
    First of all - you should NOT delete Time Machine backups in this way.
    BUT all is not lost - to remove the backup folders from your Trash can, all you need to do is hold down the Alt key whilst using the Empty Trash facility.
    Hope this helps.

    I have same problem keep getting annoying error something like 8003. trying to delete all of my back ups as well as the one back up i placed in the trash

  • HT201250 How can I migrate a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive to a new TimeCapsuls?

    I just got a 2TB Time Capsule.  I want to migrate my time machine backups on an external hard drive to the new Time Capsule.  I have about 430Gb of files to back up; I don't want to wait 7-8 days for the backup, unless I have to.  I am using OS 10.7.5 (forget which cat that is).  I have mounted the TC drive as 10.0.1.1; I tried to drag and drop from old to "data" on TC, but I get the error "The volume is the wrong format for a backup."  Any ideas how I can move my old files to the new, and bypass creating a brand new backup file?
    Thanks.

    Rather than do that, which means starting over from scratch, losing all your edits, organisation and so on, why not simply use iPhoto Library Manager to revert the Library to the older version? Easier, less destructive.
    The instructions on that are here
    If you really want to start over: you can access the Originals folder simply by going to your Pictures Folder and finding the iPhoto Library there. Right (or Control-) Click on the icon and select 'Show Package Contents'. A finder window will open with the Library exposed.

  • Transfer Time Machine backup from one external drive to another

    Surely this has been covered, but I can't find it.
    If you have your time machine backup on an external drive and get a new (larger) external drive, what is the best way to transfer the backup from one drive to the other (and define the new drive as the backup drive)? Straight copy ? Then to define the new drive, rename old drive to something else and name new drive the backup name?

    I haven't tried this yet but a few other methods are described at http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20071128055047339

  • Cannot transfer Time Machine backups from one external drive to another

    Since I bought my 13 inch MacBook Pro in September 2014 I've been keeping Time Machine backups on an external 1TB Lacie Rugged.  This is partitioned into three and one of the partitions contains my iPhoto library. 
    Last weekend I left my MBP disconnected from the power source but with the external hard drive still plugged in.  Long story short - the battery level fell below the minimum needed to operate so it turned itself off and 'disconnected' the external hard drive.  This resulted in a corrupted iPhoto library which is no longer accessible.
    In order to restore my iPhoto Library from another backup I needed to buy a second external hard drive.  Yesterday I bought a 2TB Lacie Rugged which I've now partitioned into 5. 
    I want to move my Time Machine backups from the 1TB Lacie Rugged to a partition on the 2TB Lacie Rugged (to take advantage of the new Lacie's Thunderbolt connection). 
    I read the Apple article -
    HT202380: Time Machine: How to transfer backups from the current backup drive to a new backup drive
    and followed the instructions precisely.  About 2 hours into the transfer I came back to my MacBook Pro and saw a message saying that it was not possible to complete the transfer because I did not have the correct permissions.  The only option was to click the OK button which stopped the transfer.
    Can anyone advise what I should do next?
    Cheers
    Tricia

    Hi Eric,
    Thank you for your response.  I came across another thread yesterday which suggested the Restore via Disk Utility method.  It worked for me, too.  This was after I had tried following the method suggested in the Apple article above three times but each time the message was the same ....
    The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items.
    I dare say that Apple would like to have us believe that it's a simple matter of 'drag and drop' but it certainly wasn't for me.  From what I've read the permission problem crops up fairly frequently. Before the second and third attempts  I had already amended Permissions on the Time Machine backups so that everyone could read and write, so that mustn't have been the problem.  I'm the only person who uses my computer so that's not a problem.
    The next problem I have is that I decided I would use the Restore route to transfer my SuperDuper clone rather than start from scratch.  Unfortunately, the partition size on my original backup disk where SuperDuper clone is is 350GB and the size of the SuperDuper clone partition on my new backup is 300GB.
    Of course, Apple says you can resize partitions using Disk Utility.  What they don't say is you can downsize partitions but (in my experience and that of many other frustrated users on various forums) you CANNOT upsize using Disk Utility.  I have 100GB spare on my external hard drive (from downsizing two partitions by 50GB each) BUT there is no way Disk Utility will let me increase the size of SuperDuper partition to 350GB :-(((
    Cheers
    Tricia

  • Deleted Time Machine Backups from Finder

    I back up my MacBook with Time Machine. My girlfriend has an older MacBook Pro, with Tiger. I was surprised to see that Tiger did not come with any sort of backup utility, and I eventually found Super Duper. I made a backup with Super Duper to my external hard drive with my Time Machine backups. Her computer died, and she took it to Apple. They could not restore her data, which wasn't a big problem because I had made a very recent back up.
    I then proceeded to restore the backup. I thought SD kept track of what files belonged to what computer, like TM does. It started copying my TM backups to her hard drive. This wouldn't be a problem, except she only has a 160 GB hard drive, and her backup is about 100 GB and my TM backup was another 100 GB. Thus the file restore would fail. I decided to delete the TM folder, because I was not worried about my computer, and I could create another backup after partition to avoid this disaster again.
    I deleted the TM backups... and my drive still had 200 GB of used space. Then I used Google to find out how I royally messed this up. That being said and done, I have had Disk Utility repairing my external hard drive since Thursday at 5p, and it's now 8:40a on Saturday. Furthermore, while I deleted the files, SD still enumerates them and somehow copies them which fills the hard drive before the restore is complete. When I plugged my external hard drive into my MacBook, it automatically started a new TM back up. However, it renamed the folder "Andrew Fawcett's something (2)", as if it were a duplicate folder. So OS 10.5.8 knows somehow that there are files, and so does SD, but I cannot see them.
    Apple's support told me to delete the TM backups in Finder... and to fix the invibile files to reformat the drive. How do I fix my TM backups so I can get SD to work? I have files I need to restore! From what I've read, there are a few of you familiar with SD.

    afawcett wrote:
    I back up my MacBook with Time Machine. My girlfriend has an older MacBook Pro, with Tiger. I was surprised to see that Tiger did not come with any sort of backup utility, and I eventually found Super Duper. I made a backup with Super Duper to my external hard drive with my Time Machine backups. [snip]
    I then proceeded to restore the backup. I thought SD kept track of what files belonged to what computer, like TM does. It started copying my TM backups to her hard drive. This wouldn't be a problem, except she only has a 160 GB hard drive, and her backup is about 100 GB and my TM backup was another 100 GB. Thus the file restore would fail. I decided to delete the TM folder, because I was not worried about my computer, and I could create another backup after partition to avoid this disaster again.
    I deleted the TM backups... and my drive still had 200 GB of used space. Then I used Google to find out how I royally messed this up. That being said and done, I have had Disk Utility repairing my external hard drive since Thursday at 5p, and it's now 8:40a on Saturday. Furthermore, while I deleted the files, SD still enumerates them and somehow copies them which fills the hard drive before the restore is complete. When I plugged my external hard drive into my MacBook, it automatically started a new TM back up. However, it renamed the folder "Andrew Fawcett's something (2)", as if it were a duplicate folder. So OS 10.5.8 knows somehow that there are files, and so does SD, but I cannot see them.
    Apple's support told me to delete the TM backups in Finder... and to fix the invibile files to reformat the drive. How do I fix my TM backups so I can get SD to work? I have files I need to restore! From what I've read, there are a few of you familiar with SD.
    SuperDuper! copies entire volumes. That's why it tried to transfer those Time Machine files. If you register SuperDuper! (USD28), you can tell it to exclude certain files, such as those TM files.
    If you want to use an external drive for both TM and other storage, you might be happier if you partitioned that drive, using one partition for TM and the other for any other files.
    Until you have this resolved, I'd turn off TM on both computers.

  • Deleting Time Machine Backup Folder on External HD

    HI everyone,
    Well I liked the idea of Time Machine so much, that I went out and bought an external HD to hook up to my mac to back up my files. So my time machine backups are located now on my external.
    After a recent update gone wrong, I had to wipe out the mac, and was able to get almost everything back because of time machine!! So I was sold on the idea of Time Capsule.
    Now that I have a time capsule and ready to set it up and use it for back ups, I would like to use my external for other things, but most of it is full from the Time Machine backs ups. Is there a way to delete the back ups from my external?

    Go to the Time Machine preferences pane. In there you can specify what disks you use as TM backup disks under the options tab, You should see the external HD with a tick next to it. Just untick it and that will turn the disk in to a normal drive again (not that TM actually changes the drive file structure, just gives it a new icon to show that it's a TM disk is all.
    Regards,
    Peter.
    Here's Apple's Knowledge Base article on how to do it:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1427
    Message was edited by: Peter Miller

  • Can I migrate my data from a regular hard drive to a solid state drive using only a Time Machine backup from an external hard drive?

    I just bought a Samsung 830 256GB solid state drive which I will use to replace my 15-inch, 2.53 GHz, Mid 2009 MacBook Pro's stock hard drive. I also keep an external hard drive in which I keep my regular Time Machine backups via FireWire. Would I be able to migrate all my data from it after putting in the solid state drive? I prefer not to use any third-party applications and I do not plan on replacing the SuperDrive with the hard drive that I'm going to remove from my laptop.

    chinodelarosa wrote:
    Would I be able to migrate all my data from it after putting in the solid state drive?
    Yes.

  • Importing Time Machine backup  from an external hard drive

    Hi...to all
    Last week i bought a Macbook. I pluged in my external hard drive Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus and it did a time machine backup on the Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus. The folder that was generated by the time machine on my external hard drive has the name backups.backupdb.
    Then, i decided to return the Macbook and bought a Macbook Pro.
    When I pluged the same external hard drive, Maxtor OneTOuch 4 Plus, although I am able to access and open individual files and folders, I am not able to copy neither any nor all the folders/files from my external hard drive to my new Macbook Pro. Moreover, I am able to access/open the files located in my external hard drive but when try to copy specific files from this drive to my Macbook Pro I get the following error message: Sorry the operation could not be completed because an unexpected error ocurred (Error code -50). Now, here is where it gets interesting: after 2 failed attempts to copy any single file from my external hard drive to my Macbook Pro desktop and receiving the above error message I am then able to copy the specific file (singular). This would mean that to copy the files and folders in the external hard drive i would need to do it on a one by one basis? If so, it would take forever...
    Can someone please kindly help out.
    Thanks on advance

    Are you referring to the files in Time Machine's backup directory on your hard drive? If so, and if what you are trying to do is to recover those from the backup to your working volume on the Macbook Pro (which is not what your title says you want to do but seems to be implied by the body of the question) then you need to have the computer name of the Macbook Pro the same as the computer name of the original Macbook (I think that step is required), then on the Macbook Pro choose "Browse Other Time Machine Disks" from the Time Machine menu in Dock. This will allow you to recover files or folder in the usual way.
    Alternatively, if you wanted to transfer all your user data in one go, you could fire up Migration Assistant and choose the Time Machine backup as the source to transfer the user data from (again I think the computer names have to be the same but I'm not totally sure).

  • My experiences copying Time Machine backups from one external drive to another

    I am reposting this.  The first one was rejected because it contained 'product feedback' and I was directed to the 'Terms of Use'.  The 'Terms of Use' say feedback is welcome...***?!?
    My 3TB external drive started to die a few weeks ago.  It was still under warranty and I just got the new one yesterday.  I wanted to preserve all my backups (I had every backup for my late 2012 iMac) on it.
    The short of it is that there were like 20-25 million files there or something crazy like that. Finder was going to take forever to count the files.  cp and rsync would take like a week. I decided it wasn't worth the hassle, so I just securely erased the old disk and did a new initial backup on the new disk.
    The old disk would only mount in read-only mode, so I couldn't prune the backups down to a manageable size. Unless you only have a handful of backups, or you can internally mount the drives to make it go faster, it's going to take forever to do this.
    Regards, Patrick

    Hi Eric,
    Thank you for your response.  I came across another thread yesterday which suggested the Restore via Disk Utility method.  It worked for me, too.  This was after I had tried following the method suggested in the Apple article above three times but each time the message was the same ....
    The operation can't be completed because you don't have permission to access some of the items.
    I dare say that Apple would like to have us believe that it's a simple matter of 'drag and drop' but it certainly wasn't for me.  From what I've read the permission problem crops up fairly frequently. Before the second and third attempts  I had already amended Permissions on the Time Machine backups so that everyone could read and write, so that mustn't have been the problem.  I'm the only person who uses my computer so that's not a problem.
    The next problem I have is that I decided I would use the Restore route to transfer my SuperDuper clone rather than start from scratch.  Unfortunately, the partition size on my original backup disk where SuperDuper clone is is 350GB and the size of the SuperDuper clone partition on my new backup is 300GB.
    Of course, Apple says you can resize partitions using Disk Utility.  What they don't say is you can downsize partitions but (in my experience and that of many other frustrated users on various forums) you CANNOT upsize using Disk Utility.  I have 100GB spare on my external hard drive (from downsizing two partitions by 50GB each) BUT there is no way Disk Utility will let me increase the size of SuperDuper partition to 350GB :-(((
    Cheers
    Tricia

  • Each Time Machine backup grows and grows. How do I stop this?

    Hi everyone. In basic terms, let's say that my external LaCie 3TB hard drive has 2TB of data. This 2TB includes my Time Machine backup. That means that I have 1TB of free space. My last backup was one week ago (I don't keep my external HD hooked up because of travel and I don't care for so many frequent backups). Right now I am backing up, and the backup is 30GB larger than last week. THERE IS NO WAY I MADE 30GB OF CHANGES IN THIS PAST WEEK! At the most, I probably made 1GB of changes. This situation has happened before, so it seems that with each backup (every time I reconnect my external HD for the sole purpose of backing up... Again, I don't leave my HD connected so I back up manually whenever I feel like it, instead of automatic), my data seems to have grown by dozens of GB. Dozens! I'm gonna run outta space soon if this keeps up.
    I've read a number of threads on this topic and checked out Pondini.org but my one question does not seem to be answered:
    How do I stop my backups from growing so big when I know for a fact I did not make big changes?
    This does not equate. If I made 1GB of changes (I'm guessing), then why does Time Machine back up an additional 29GB?
    I'm considering ditching Time Machine and backing up totally manually, like, dragging/copying/pasting files and folders from my laptop into my external HD. At least that way I can control and understand that 2TB of data means 2TB, not: "Surprise! 2.03TB... 2.5TB... 2.75TB and mysteriously growing!"
    Any help would be appreciated, please. Also, I don't know code and I can't do open-source stuff and I don't know jargon. I also don't do advanced stuff like Parallel (I don't know what that is). If you could please help a dummy like me with plain-speak, that would be beyond awesome. Thanks!
    ***MacBook Pro from late 2011, OSX 10.7.5, LaCie Porsche external HD 3TB***

    Some good options are:
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    Data Backup
    Deja Vu
    SuperDuper!
    Synk Pro
    Tri-Backup
    Each provides a trial version before paying.

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