HELP -- ridding the rubbish

using OSX 10.8.2, iMac, 2.8 GHxIntel Core 2 Duo with 2 G 667 MGz DDR2 SDRAM

In an effort to clear space on my external backup hard drive, which is used for both photo and document storage as well as Time Machine backup and had filled to near total capacity, I cut all the back-up files and dragged them to the trash to eliminate.

I hit the "Empty Trash" command, and the process began, ( nearly 90K files to eliminate)...but once the 90K files were done being processed...the whole countdown started in reverse....in other words....the files started re-poulating in the trash with -1,-2, etc, and before I knew it, the trash was FULL again.
The trash will NOT empty...even though at the start of the process, the message appeared asking if I wanted to discard locked files ( which I answered YES to).

Any ideas? What am doing wrong? How can I rid this drive of these excessive files to make room for more overwriting, if I cannot delete them?

I thought Time Machine would just keep overwriting old files to make room for new ones...but at one point towards it gave me an error notice advising that the drive was nearly full, and that I needed more space for backup.

Clearly, I am bean brain ...and YOU are the brilliants....so I sure would appreciate your help on this, fellas.

Thanks ever so much.
Jules....who would rather spend her time writing, then fooling around with this nonsense.
Cheers for now.

That was the wrong way to manually remove backup files from Time Machine. The correct way is to enter Time Machine and select (one at a time) the backups from the right side and delete them. Depending on the individual size of the backup file, it may take several minutes to delete.

The correct procedure is as follows:

Select the backup to delete from the right side (pink date) and bring it forward. When the backup is front and center, right click on it and select "delete". You can only do one at a time otherwise it will fail or overload the Trash.

rubbish heap

Yikes.
Thanks for the quick reply, chscag.

...assuming I need to replace those files I dragged into the trash

( they still reside there, as you know....

just tried to do so....and it will NOT let me replace them.

Error message says :The item “2010-11-02-074249” can’t be moved because “Backups.backupdb” can’t be modified.
should I just create a NEW backup folder and drag them into that?

Sorry for the bother, friend, but when I find a Brilliant Guy, I latch like a key.

Unless those backups were critical, I would not bother. Assuming you have another external hard drive you can use as temp storage, move your photos and other files to there first. Then, erase the external hard drive and start over making backups.

Also, you may want to think about doing backups using software that will clone or copy your entire Mac's hard drive to an external drive while at the same time rendering it bootable.

Carbon Copy Cloner (recommended)

SuperDuper