How to empty MobileBackups.trash content

I noticed that OSX reports a wrong disk space amount, reporting that "Other" space is near to 170Gb.

Digging into the issue here "Huge inconsistency in disk space measurement, missing 50% of the disk" I discovered that the root cause of the issue is the MobileBackups.trash folder that contains some files, really old, and a backup of a VM created more than one year ago.

I tried some suggestions that says to disable local backup with no luck (running sudo tmutil disable local had no effects on disk space).

I can manually delete the above files using for example GrandPerspective, but I suspect that manually is not the way to go.

What is the correct way to purge that folder?

Update: seems to be somewhat related to CrashPlan, that I used to have installed at that time and that seems to not really like to coexist with Time Machine

Solution 1:

Fixed following @bruno-buccolo suggestion to run sudo rm -rf /.MobileBackups.trash

Solution 2:

I discovered an alternative method of removing these folders.

Apparently, these are created by Time Machine backup when it does not have access to the backup drive.

Running the following command from a terminal will disable this feature and reclaim the disk space:

sudo tmutil disablelocal

I learned about this from this article:

https://classicyuppie.com/what-crap-is-this-os-xs-mobilebackups/

Hope this helps someone!