need help emptying trash of time machine inProgress files
hi
I need help deleting two time machine inProgress packages from my trash. one of them in particular i believe is hogging about 200GB of space on my time capsule. the files are from an old sparsebundle for my mac pro. i had to create a fresh sparsebundle when i couldn't link the old one to a clone of my startup drive (which i did when i wanted to upgrade the size of my startup drive). i want to keep the old sparsebundle in case i need to manually find old files. but i don't need these inProgress packages.
i have been able to move the two packages to the trash. then, when i try to secure empty trash i get the 'preparing to empty trash' progress bar and it takes about 12 hours (i kid not) to prepare the 1,900,000 approx files to be emptied from the trash. ok, i can live with that. but then when i was finally able to choose to empty the items from the trash, i got the next progress bar which was counting down the files deleted at a rate of about 1 per second (again, i kid not). i left it overnight and in the morning it had moved from around 1,900,000 to 1,880,000. at this rate i estimate it will take 22 days to empty the trash!
So, I am wondering if there is another way of doing this, what would seem like, a simple task.
thanks
nick
I need help deleting two time machine inProgress packages from my trash. one of them in particular i believe is hogging about 200GB of space on my time capsule. the files are from an old sparsebundle for my mac pro. i had to create a fresh sparsebundle when i couldn't link the old one to a clone of my startup drive (which i did when i wanted to upgrade the size of my startup drive). i want to keep the old sparsebundle in case i need to manually find old files. but i don't need these inProgress packages.
i have been able to move the two packages to the trash. then, when i try to secure empty trash i get the 'preparing to empty trash' progress bar and it takes about 12 hours (i kid not) to prepare the 1,900,000 approx files to be emptied from the trash. ok, i can live with that. but then when i was finally able to choose to empty the items from the trash, i got the next progress bar which was counting down the files deleted at a rate of about 1 per second (again, i kid not). i left it overnight and in the morning it had moved from around 1,900,000 to 1,880,000. at this rate i estimate it will take 22 days to empty the trash!
So, I am wondering if there is another way of doing this, what would seem like, a simple task.
thanks
nick
Comments
1.) Empty the trash normally, then use Disk Utility to "erase free space", choosing the zero data option (multi-pass is overkill and not necessary).
2.) Open terminal and navigate to the trash. Assuming your time machine backups are on an external drive, the trash folder will be something like /volumes/<name of external drive>/.Trashes/501/. One way to confirm this location is to open the trash in terminal, then drag one of the time machine files from the trash to an open terminal window. This will then show the path of that file.
Once you're in the correct trash directory, you can run the command "srm -s -v -r *", without the quotes. Warning: be 10000000000000000% sure you are in the correct directory as the srm command is a "secure delete" version of the standard "rm" delete command, and the -r * option essentially means "delete everything in this directory and all subdirectories". Run the command in the wrong place and bye bye lots of data. The -s option causes srm to write zeroes rather than do a multi-pass, and the -v option stands for "verbose" and lets you know what's going on by printing progress to the command line, one file at a time (e.g. it'll say "removing file a", "done", "removing file b", "done" etc. etc.)
Option 2.) will be by far the quickest but has the highest probability of deleting stuff you don't want to delete if you screw up.