Stopping and Clearing Trash Process

[skays]

Think I really screwed up. I went into Time Machine and selected 2 years of backups and drug them to Trash to delete. Now I believe Trash is in the process of deleting hundreds of thousands of files...maybe a million or more????...and it will take days or weeks to complete. How do I remove those items from the Trash and stop the very time consuming...and CPU consuming...process. I am running macOS 10.14 Mojave. I believe I need to enter data in the Terminal, but I am not a coder process, so please....and instructions provided please go step-by-step, i.e.... 1. Open terminal 2. Enter xxxxxxxx 3. Hit return. 4 Enter xxxxxx. Thank you in advance for any and all help

 

[MacInWin]

OK, you have a thoroughly mucked up system now. By doing what you did, you basically destroyed the entire TM backup. The way to remove backups from TM is to use TM, not Finder. Because of the way TM actually does the backup, manually reaching in and manipulating the files destroys the integrity of the database. And that is what you have done.

So, at this point, you have little option except to let it run and then reformat the drive (assuming that all it had on it was TM) and then restart a new TM backup. All the history is gone.

Sorry to be the bearer of the bad news, but there you are.

If you have other stuff besides the TM backups on the drive, let the deletion run to completion, then copy off those files from the drive and do the reformatting/restarting.

(BTW: the reason I say reformat the drive is that now that the TM backup is corrupted, TM cannot delete it, and if you do the same thing with Finder, you'll be waiting forever for the deletion to complete, just as you are now. Reformatting will just ignore what's there and make it go away without the deletion process.)

BTW, I know this because I did it myself once.

EDIT: Corrected a spelling error.

 

[ferrarr]

When you say you went into Time Machine, how specifically did you do that? Did you use Finder and navigate to your external TM drive, or did you go open the TM app and delete the files that way?

 

[skays]

I appreciate both or your responses. External drive (WD 2TB USB drive ~ 4 years old), is only used for Time Machine. What I did was go into the TM drive...double clicking on the external hard drive desktop icon and saw the list of 'folders' with MO/DAY/YR names. Selected three years worth of folders starting with the oldest and leaving two years worth of backups. Then right clicked and moved to trash. The 2015 data has been erased already and hopefully within the next day or so, the remaining backup files will be erased and the 'trash can' will be empty. Having said that, the integrity of the external drive has been compromised so I need to go into disk utility and reformat the drive? Any special format options I need to use...partitions, etc? Again, thank you both for the information and advice. AND one more thing. When should I replace that external drive?

Added Edit: I have not received any Time Machine error messages yet, so I assume Time Machine is continuing to backup correctly? Or bad assumption?

 

[MacInWin]

Yep, that was Finder you used and the TM database is now not going to work for you at all, so reformatting is the best path forward. Just leave the formatting as it is now, which Disk Utility will show you when you select the drive. As for replacing the drive, it's hard to say. Drives are funny things, they can die early, or last forever. On average, that drive is getting a bit old, so replacing it may be a good idea, particularly if it's showing any errors at all. You can use something like DriveDX to analyze it to see if it is showing signs of aging.

Just curious, why did you do the deletions? If the drive is all TM, when TM runs out of space, it will do the deletions and maintain the integrity of the database for you.

 

[IWT]

@skays

Truly sorry about the misery all this has caused. No one could addd to Jake's excellent explanation of what happened.

I need to go into disk utility and reformat the drive? Any special format options I need to use...partitions, etc?

I see from your specs - and thanks for displaying them under your Avatar, great help -that your are running macOS Mojave. What I don't know is whether your Mac's Internal Hard Drive is Fusion or SSD. I strongly suspect Fusion.

Why I mention this is that there has been considerable discussion about which Format to use if you were considering a cloning software Backup (BU), especially Carbon Copy Cloner. BUT for a Time Machine BU, you should Format your External Hard Drive OS X Extended (Journaled), also known as HFS+.

Do NOT Format it APFS. This may change in the future, but for now, it's OS X Extended (Journaled).

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

In addition to what Ian has said, the drive should already be in HFS+ format, as TM required that for a backup drive. So, when you format it, DU should show that it is in the format Ian explained and all you will need to do is to let it reformat in that same format.

BTW, if you want more on why Finder cannot be used in TM files, I wrote this in another thread a while ago:

For education, when you look at the TM backup in Finder, as you said you did, the "files" you see there are NOT files, but symbolic links to the files. That's how TM works. When you first backup your system everything is literally copied over to the backup drive. At the next backup, TM looks for those files which have changed, and copies ONLY those over, but then creates symbolic links in the new backup the the files in the original backup. At the third backup, it repeats that process. At that point the backup has some original files with two symbolic links to them chained together, some files that changed in the first backup with symbolic links in the third backup and some files that are in the original backup with symbolic links in the second, but a new version in the third. And each backup has other NEW files that were first created in either the second or third backup. Confused? Look at these three lines:

A B C <-- original backup with files A, B and C
A' B' C+ <-- first backup (the letters with the "'" are not files, but links to the original A files, C+ is a new version of C)
A+ B' C+' <-- Now we have a new A version, but a link to the not-so-new C+ file. The B file is unchanged from the first backup.

This use of links continues through all of the TM backups. What that means is that although Finder shows a file, what is really there may be the head of a very long chain of symbolic links all the way back to the original backup.

So, when you deleted the older "files" directly, you deleted some original source files that still have links to them in a chain going all the way back (files which have not changed since that time, typically photo images, music files, etc.), and you deleted some links. And all of that mucks up TM because when TM tries to rebuild any given backup and cannot get back to the original file, it gets lost.

Hope that helps some.

 

[Slydude]

Excellent comments all round guys. Not much to add to the advice that has been given so far. For others who might be reading this thread in the future let me clarify one thing. When someone uses the Finder to delete Time Machine backups that doesn't usually mess up the directory structure for the drive. In fact Disk Utility often reports no errors or easily fixable directory errors. What does get mangled is the internal sturcutre of the links that Time Machine uses to track the files and any changes.

 

[MacInWin]

That's true, Sly. The only reason for having to format is to avoid the long-running deletion process to get rid of the damaged TM backups.

 

[Slydude]

Yeah. I've made that mistake before. I think I had to power down the Mac to get that deletion process to stop.