A simple "rm -rf" has always worked for me, too while the Finder sometimes might work, sometimes not; anyway, certainly a piece of software that should be improved, the Finder: it still isn't completely reliable, after so many years Big thanks for sharing this approach -- one delete command per file, running over and over from cmdline. I was experiencing issues deleting the bands out of sparsebundle image on a time capsule. Approx 75, files here. Tried Finder and it crawled 1 file every ten minutes , the basic rm -rfdv commandline approach with a directory name hung for hours, the rm rf with a wildcard failed out trying to expand the wildcard.
This is the only approach that seems to be making steady progress deleting bands out of a sparsebundle on my time capsule. Signed up for a user account here just to say thanks. I prefer to use Windows. It's more steps, but you get a progress bar. It's quite fast: 1. Open Windows Explorer 4.
Key in your user ID for ID and the Time Capsule administrative password not the wireless password and not your logon password. Click on the sparsebundle in Windows Explorer 7. Delete it. You will get a nice dialog, a time estimate, number of minutes left, etc. A VirtualBox hosted image of Windows 7 did the trick for me and I probably would not have considered using Windows without your comment.
My Time Capsule resident sparsebundle was GB -- I couldn't even "ls" the "bands" directory from Terminal much less open the directory in Finder.
After about 30 minutes of "Calculating Seems like it's time for me to learn to proactively prune my backup tree before it gets so large. I just used the main hint as described above. I tried what everyone else said too except for deleting it from a Windows machine , but the main hint description is the only one that seemed to work on my GB sparsebundle. It's possible the perl script was working, but I couldn't tell. The main script lists the names of what's being deleted, so you can see the progress.
I also checked in a different Terminal window, in the sparsebundle directory not the bands directory using ls -l every once in a while and I could see the bands directory size going down.
It did take a couple of hours but it seems this is the fastest way short of formatting the disk. Lost your password? Powered by the Parse. It turned out to be impossible to delete the disk image - in Finder, it would just not move to the Trash, even after waiting for several hours.
I was looking for advice and most of the suggestions involved reformatting the Time Capsule, but I couldn't do this, as I had other Macs being backed up there.
I looked for a way to do this from the command line. The Time Machine disk image - a sparsebundle, a special type of disk image that can increase in size as needed - is actually a package, which has "bands" inside, many smaller files that are named hexadecimally. In this case, there were thousands of them. So many, that even deleting them from the command line didn't work - commands like rm find limitations in the lengths of lists parsed by recursion or wildcards, so a basic command like rm -f didn't work.
I ended up writing a little script, which removes the files one by one. I moved over all the files I need, and installed all the apps I was using on the other one. After spending a day and a half making a backup of the sparsebundle on my old iMac just in case , I am now ready to get rid of that sparsebundle off of my Time Capsule, so I can start backing up my new iMac to it.
Because I am also backing up my MBP to it, simply erasing it is not an option at this point. I need to be able to just remove that one sparsebundle, which, of course, has to be huge I think it is about gigs at this point. I have been looking online for the fastest way to delete the sparsebundle, but am not sure which method is best, and most of the responses are from or , so I want to be sure there is not something new I should try. Here are the options I have seen, and I am hoping someone can point me to the best one, or give me an alternate suggestion.
If it happens that the best one takes days to accomplish, then so be it, but it would be good to know the timeframe going into it. Any alternative suggestions that anyone has would be welcome as well. I just want to be able to get this old one deleted and start backing up my new one, without losing my MBP backup. Posted on Sep 4, AM. If you had not thought about and done what comes naturally you would not have even known there was a problem.
Posted on Sep 4, PM. Page content loaded. Sep 4, AM. Sep 4, PM. It took almost a full day to make a backup of the sparsebundle to a backup drive, so it honestly never occurred to me that it would be this easy to delete it! Finder never showed a progress bar, even when I tried with a small amount of files. Nautilus the Ubuntu equivalent , on the other hand, has a nice little wheel that shows the overall status when you delete files and folders.
Everything went smoothly in Ubuntu and even command-line was easy to work with despite the thousands of files in the "bands" folder. Easy access to 'Bands' in a. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is it safe to delete my Time Machine sparse bundle?
Can a fresh one be recreated? Ask Question. Asked 6 years, 6 months ago. Active 2 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 40k times. Can anyone provide advice? I cannot find any advice on this specific subject anwhere. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Disable Time Machine first. Instead of deleting the whole bundle at once: Right-click and choose Show Package Contents. Open the bands folder. Select a large number of bands at a time seems to be good from what I read and move those to the trash.
Repeat until all bands have been deleted, then delete the main sparsebundle file. Improve this answer. Thanks for the suggestion. What IS the "bands" folder? Just afraid to try these steps without knowing what that is.
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