Mac – Changed Time Machine hard drives

backupdeletingtime-machine

Wonder if anyone can help.

I changed over hard drives to use for my Time Machine backups of my mac and have completed a new backup on my new external hard drive.

On the old external drive that i want to use for a different purpose now, there is a folder called "Backups.backupdb".

Can i delete this folder now that i have a complete backup of my computer on a new drive?

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

Use Disk Utility to reformat the old drive. It will be much quicker than forcing the Finder to delete hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of files by throwing it in the trash.

If you have other files on this old disk you want to keep on this drive, you can:

  • copy them to another disk; reformat the old disk; copy them back to old disk

or

  • use Terminal to delete Backups.backupdb using the rm -d -r command. Using Terminal removes a lot of overhead imposed by a Finder delete and works much faster.
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