Tried Deleting Time Machine Backups, Can't Empty Trash!

wassanova

I decided to delete my time machine backups because I long ago ran out of disk space to use Time Machine and all the backups are over a year old. Stupidly, I just dragged the entire backups folder to the trash and tried to empty it. It brings up the little "Preparing to empty trash" status window and slowly counts over 511,000 files before giving me the following message for every single one of those 511,000:

Emptying the Trash cannot be completed because "xxxxx.xxx" is locked. To empty everything in the Trash, including locked items, press the Option key while selecting Empty Trash.

Well, so, obviously I tried that. No dice. I even put a book down on the Option key while to hold it down while it counted up all 500 gajillion files, and that didn't work either. So then I tried unlocking all the items in the folder from the Info window. No go there either.



Then I tried moving the folder back to its original location and start over, and it wouldn't let me do it. The error message I got said that there was not enough disk space and I don't have sufficient privileges to do it anyway (this is the first time I've ever gotten a two-fold error message).



So, not only can I not get rid of these backups, I can't actually delete anything because I can't empty the trash.



Anyone that can help me will be rewarded, both karmically and possibly more tangibly as well.

davechen

Did you try the "Secure Empty Trash" option? In the Finder it's under the Finder menu item, just below the Empty Trash option. That should allow you to delete files that have permissions problems. It'll ask you for your password before it does it.

rezwits

batchmod has force empty trash if that doesn't cut it...



Laters...