Mac – Dual TIme Machine backups; “Delete all backups of a file” applies to only one drive? (Bug?)

backuptime-machine

Asked at Apple Discussions but the silence is deafening…

I'm using two 2TB internal drives in tandem for Time Machine and deleted some files while in Time Machine. They deleted from drive A, but drive B still has the files. Is there a way to delete these? I tried unmounting drive A in Disk Utility but then I can't enter Time Machine.

I love the dual backups, but should I be able to do dual deletes of files/backups? I don't see a way to accomplishg this except to force Time Machine to do a backup, then delete the files again so it switches drives, but that seems a bit convoluted.

If one of you guru types has an answer I'd be most interested.

Thanks.

Mike

Mac Pro 3.1 8 Core ML.3

Best Answer

I don't know if it has any caveats or risks, but you can also use bypass to delete files on backups:

sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Helpers/bypass rm -rf /Volumes/*/Backups.backupdb/*/*/*/Users/$USER/Documents/folder

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