Deleting the time machine backup from an external hard drive

I wanted to delete the backup because I got another hard drive for that and wanted to free up the space on this one that I had been using for that, and so I moved the whole Backups.backupdb file to the trash. I think I've learned the hard way that is not the way to do it.  Now I can't get it out of the trash, and it continues to take up space on the hard drive. Secure empty doesn't do it. I repaired permissions, and the drive itself in disk utilities, which didn't help. I have a lot of other stuff on that disk which I would like to keep, so I don't want to wipe the whole thing. Please help.

Next time just use Disk Utility and Erase the Drive, it will be much faster and a whole lot less trouble.
In fact it might not hurt to do that as well, after you get the Trash emptied.

Similar Messages

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    chinodelarosa wrote:
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  • Time Machine backups corrupt or external hard drive failure?

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    ali_baba7 wrote:
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Invalid node structure
    2010-12-29 21:20:22 -0800: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
    It's possible a heavy-duty 3rd-party utility such as +Disk Warrior+ can fix that. It's about $100, and there's no guarantee, but it's probably a good investment for the future.
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    The structure of the file system is damaged.
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  • How to I get Time Machine backups OFF my external hard drive?!?!?

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    pvonk wrote:
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  • Time machine backup to new external hard drive

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  • Need to delete old time machine backups from a external drive

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