Unable to change permissions en masse... please help!

Jeff Yarberry wrote:

Ugh... sounds like there's no way around being able to delete them. I have them on a Partitioned drive, so--based upon the feedback from everyone here--the best call seems to be for me to move on from these Backups on the partitioned drive, and get a solitary drive for future backups.

So much for my efforts to be frugal...

Thanks!

You can still erase the partition and backup to it. However, it would be better to use a single APFS container with multiple Volumes. You can set a Quota for Time Machine to only use a certain amount of the available storage.

While you don’t indicate how your partitions are organized and used…

Having met a semi-related configuration much too often, I’d suggest not placing any TM archives in partitions on the same physical device as any source partitions.

That for two reasons: TM already provides that feature when the external storage is unavailable and pools the storage when doing so, and that placement risks one-egg-one-basket failures or partition corruptions of that storage.

Partition corruptions and hardware failures (or dunks or drops or thefts) in these configurations can unfortunately clobber ~everything; source and backup.

Reformat the TM drive. TM goes to some effort to protect itself and its files.

> I'm attempting to delete old Time Machine backups

I'd just create a new Time Machine backup on a freshly formatted disk. Or, if I still want to hold on to some old backups, get a new backup disk and archive that old disk for a while.

I'd additionally create another backup set using Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper, just in case.

https://tidbits.com/2023/10/13/international-verify-your-backups-day/

If they are merely "locked" you can hold down the option key when emptying the trash.

You will likely be unable to empty the trash.

However, you should not delete Time Machine backups. You should erase the disk after having removed the drive from the backup set and start over. Since trash is per-disk, when you erase the drive, those items will no longer exist in the Trash.

Seems strange that I can't change the permissions for a parent folder so that it affects all files within.

You can, but that's not the root cause of your problem.

My takeaway so far is that you can't delete Time Machine backups... no matter how old they are. Sad... :-(

That would be correct. It is no longer possible to delete any Time Machine backup.