# Made a mess of Time Machine!!!



## Swanny48 (Aug 29, 2019)

Mac Mojave 10.14.6

This is nothing to do with LR or Adobe but there seems to be some very knowledgeable people here, so I'll try this forum first.
Through a lack of Apple know how, I've made a mess of Time Machine.
Some time ago with the help of a friend, I set up my first iMac and copied all my photographs and music from my Windows desktop to a new 3TB Seagate drive (named Johns Files) attached to the iMac.
I then bought another 3TB Seagate drive and set up Time Machine to backup the iMac drive and Johns Files. Everything was going fine (or so I thought) and about every hour it would do a backup.
After several months, there was a message saying Time Machine disk was full, so should it delete early backup, I clicked ok and the new backup progressed.
It happened again a few weeks later, so I then manually trashed some of the early backups.
After establishing that everything was working ok, I went into trash to permanently delete the backups.
It was then that I notices that there was a red "no entry' sign alongside all of the 'Johns Files' backups.
After Googling the problem, it seemed there was a problem with disc permissions. I changed these and the next backup didn't have the 'no entry' sign alongside Johns Files, I could go into these backups and find the files/photos.
The problem now is, I still cannot delete the backups from trash. if I try to delete a 'Johns Files' backup from trash, I get a message telling me the file is still in use.

Currently, permissions are as follows.
Mac HD, system read & write. wheel read only. everyone read only
Johns Files, John, Read & write, Staff, read & write, everyone, read only.
Time Machine, system, read & write, wheel, read & write, everyone, read only.
What should the permissions be?

Currently I have only used about 1.3TB of Johns Files and before long, intend buying a larger drive for Time Machine.

Thanks
John


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 29, 2019)

Try this: hold down the Option key while emptying the trash. If that does not work, temporarily turn off Time Machine, restart the Mac and try again.


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## Swanny48 (Aug 29, 2019)

Johan Elzenga said:


> Try this: hold down the Option key while emptying the trash. If that does not work, temporarily turn off Time Machine, restart the Mac and try again.


Thanks Johan
Hopefully it's progressing ok.  Previously I'd not tried completely emptying the trash, as I wanted to just delete one backup to test all was ok.
I've now followed your suggestion of holding down option key and empty trash.  That was six hours ago and it's still running , with a message saying "emptying the trash, 410,000 items deleted"

John


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## Swanny48 (Sep 1, 2019)

Emptying the trash has now been running for 70hrs and currently shows 2410075 items deleted.
Hopefully I'm doing the right thing keeping it running?
I did try opening trash after a few hours and received message saying trash could not be opened while items were being deleted.
Just didn't expect it to take anywhere near this time

John


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## Swanny48 (Sep 1, 2019)

It eventually completed the task a few hours ago.  Emptying the trash was running for about 45hrs and deleted about 3.24 million items !!! from the trashed Time Machine backups.  I now have an empty trash bin and all seems ok.
Thank you Johan

John


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## Johan Elzenga (Sep 2, 2019)

Good to hear!


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