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Result of deleting the time machine of my old Mac Pro

 

Well, thankfully my trash is now emptied, after I foolishly , without thinking, sent the old Mac Pro backups to trash. There was about 2 years worth. After nothing worked, I decided to just let the trash try to empty itself on Saturday afternoon. It chugged away bravely till late yesterday afternoon, when It hit about 2 million files and stopped. At that point, I had about 6 months, from Sometime in April to sept 16 left in 49 folders.Now, I was able to do the delete immediately command to individual Folders. Last night I could do 2 at a time, and by this am, 4.

Now it is all finished..Phew..Yay! I am really pleased with how my new Imac handled this task. I should have know better, but just was not thinking . Two Mac pros ago, my backup would not delete when the disk was getting full. When I got the notice, I would have to manually delete, and it was a PITA! I almost always had to resort to Trash It! But this Imac just kept chugging along like the little engine that could until the job was done, and it saved me from reformatting and staring all over
Jeannie?
 

Howdy.

Jeannie, Time Machine backups don't backup every file every time. If
you have a file that hasn't changed in weeks, and with Time Machine
doing a backup about every 60 minutes, there aren't dozens of version
of that unchanged file in the backups. TM uses some called a link
(also a hard link) to link each backup with this tiny little link to
the unchanged file.

A hard link is a little bit like an alias but different. There is also
a symbolic link in the Unix system but most folks just use an alias for
convenience.

It's all these links that can take a lot of time to delete.

For future reference, shutting off Time Machine, then deleting a backup
folder, is probably a faster way to do it.

Good luck.

Denver Dan


On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 10:57:40 -0600, Jeannie Girard wrote:
Well, thankfully my trash is now emptied, after I foolishly , without
thinking, sent the old Mac Pro backups to trash. There was about 2
years worth. After nothing worked, I decided to just let the trash
try to empty itself on Saturday afternoon. It chugged away bravely
till late yesterday afternoon, when It hit about 2 million files and
stopped. At that point, I had about 6 months, from Sometime in April
to sept 16 left in 49 folders.Now, I was able to do the delete
immediately command to individual Folders. Last night I could do 2 at
a time, and by this am, 4.

Now it is all finished..Phew..Yay! I am really pleased with how my
new Imac handled this task. I should have know better, but just was
not thinking . Two Mac pros ago, my backup would not delete when the
disk was getting full. When I got the notice, I would have to
manually delete, and it was a PITA! I almost always had to resort to
Trash It! But this Imac just kept chugging along like the little
engine that could until the job was done, and it saved me from
reformatting and staring all over
Jeannie?
[|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|]

iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro
 

¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

For future reference, shutting off Time Machine, then deleting a backup
folder, is probably a faster way to do it.

And the best way for that may be using Terminal, and ¡°tmutil¡±:

How to remove Time Machine backups

Be careful with sudo and making sure you pick the correct Mac's files since there is no undo or confirmation of the following command:

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/old_mac_name

The sudo command needs your password (and it won't echo to the screen, so just type it and pause to be sure you're deleting the correct files before pressing enter). If you want to be safer, you can pick one snapshot to delete first to be sure the command works as intended. This is nice since it could take hours to clean up some larger backup sets and you want to leave the Mac confident it's deleting the correct information store.

You can use the tmutil tool to delete backups one by one.

sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/mac_name/YYYY-MM-DD-hhmmss

What I have done in the past is open the backup drive in Finder, drill down to the level with the actual backup files I want to delete, then open Terminal and enter <sudo tmutil delete ?>, then drag-and-drop the files, 1 by 1, from the Finder window into the terminal window.

--?
Jim Saklad
jimdoc@...
 

Thanks, Dan. I did shut off Time machine, as I saw when I first started, That if it went on, all deleting stopped.

Now after I take a breather and go about my computer stuff for a few days, I will upgrade to Catalina .

BTW, I sure saw that I was addicted to my computer, but I sure did get a lot of other stuff on my to do list done in the past 3 snowy days.
Jeannie?

On Oct 30, 2019, at 12:05 PM, Daniel Settles <denver1.dan1@...> wrote:

Howdy.

Jeannie, Time Machine backups don't backup every file every time. If
you have a file that hasn't changed in weeks, and with Time Machine
doing a backup about every 60 minutes, there aren't dozens of version
of that unchanged file in the backups. TM uses some called a link
(also a hard link) to link each backup with this tiny little link to
the unchanged file.

A hard link is a little bit like an alias but different. There is also
a symbolic link in the Unix system but most folks just use an alias for
convenience.

It's all these links that can take a lot of time to delete.

For future reference, shutting off Time Machine, then deleting a backup
folder, is probably a faster way to do it.

Good luck.

Denver Dan


On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 10:57:40 -0600, Jeannie Girard wrote:
Well, thankfully my trash is now emptied, after I foolishly , without
thinking, sent the old Mac Pro backups to trash. There was about 2
years worth. After nothing worked, I decided to just let the trash
try to empty itself on Saturday afternoon. It chugged away bravely
till late yesterday afternoon, when It hit about 2 million files and
stopped. At that point, I had about 6 months, from Sometime in April
to sept 16 left in 49 folders.Now, I was able to do the delete
immediately command to individual Folders. Last night I could do 2 at
a time, and by this am, 4.

Now it is all finished..Phew..Yay! I am really pleased with how my
new Imac handled this task. I should have know better, but just was
not thinking . Two Mac pros ago, my backup would not delete when the
disk was getting full. When I got the notice, I would have to
manually delete, and it was a PITA! I almost always had to resort to
Trash It! But this Imac just kept chugging along like the little
engine that could until the job was done, and it saved me from
reformatting and staring all over
Jeannie?
[|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|][|]

iSent from iDan's GyazMail on my MacPro

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