Monday, March 26, 2012

Holy Loaf Don't Delete Timemachine Backups!

So that's a big no-no.  Logically, though, there's no warning pop-up or "are you sure" dialog box, it just lets you do it and then some nasty bit of OS schizophrenia rattles around in there like a drunken wad of razorwire with parkinson's.

So, point is, there's no good way to limit the size of a timemachine backup file.  You have to either partition the drive, or fill it up with everything you ever want on it BEFORE setting it up as a timemachine drive.

I did eventually fix it by formatting the external harddrive.  Pretty drastic right?  I tried some utilities that were supposed to "force empty" the trash (heh), but they didn't work.  Trash It and...uh...Cocktail.  They said stuff like, "be patient" and "it may take a bit if you're deleting timemachine files," but I couldn't find any indication of what time-scale "a bit" was measured on.  A bit like a whole 10 seconds, or a bit like "I'm worried about this because I haven't turned my computer off for a month?"

Whatever.  Don't do that again.  Better to buy another GD ex-HD.

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