Cannot delete old backups, please help

[ringster]

I have a MacPro, 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xenon. I have 2 1TB internal hard drives, running OS X, Version 10.11.5 on my main drive, and just a slightly older version on the other drive, which I use with Time Machine.

For a while, some months ago, I was using my main drive for backups, which now occupy almost 400 GB of space. I am unable to delete these files. I have booted from the other drive, and cannot delete them that way either. Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, thank you

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

Have you turned TM off?

Also you could try this,
Open a Terminal window and type the following command into the terminal and press Enter:
sudo tmutil disablelocal

This should disable the local snapshots feature in TM. Make a coffee then go mack to the Mac and your Mac should automatically purge all the local snapshots from your startup disk.

But make sure you have backed up to an external source first.

 

[ringster]

Hi:

Thanks for your reply. Yes, TM is off. I will try what you suggested, but before I do I would like to make sure you understand it is not just the snapshots I'm trying to dump. For a short time, 29 days to be specific, I had no separate backup drive, so I had Time Machine do backups to my main drive. As a result I have day after day of the contents of my entire drive just sitting there, like 29 copies of my iTunes library at 4.26 GB per copy, 29 copies of the Library at 7.58 GB per copy, 29 copies of my System at 8.29 GB per copy, etc., et., etc. Thank you.

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

That command should have instantly set the purple backups category to Zero.