Is it safe to delete my Time Machine sparse bundle? Can a fresh one be recreated?
As long as you don't care about anything in the backup being gone, yes it is safe to remove the sparsebundle.
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 (8000 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.
Sparsebundles are created for each machine backed up to Time Machine. I needed to delete one of these sparsebundle files. Manually deleting thousands of files under the 'Bands' folder takes a long time. The faster and easiest method is:
- Open Terminal
- Switch to 'Superuser': sudo su (you will be asked for your admin user pw)
- Change directory to your Time Machine/Sparsebundle path: cd /filepath to Time Machine
- List files to be sure you see the Sparsebundle you wish to remove: ls
- Remove the sparsebundle: rm -R "sparsebundle_filename.sparsebundle"
- Exit Superuser: exit
- Close Terminal
Note that while logged in as Superuser you can do anything to your Mac so be certain you know what you're doing while logged in as 'su'. Also, I put my filename in quotes as it contained spaces, you do not need to enclose in quotes if your filename does not contain any spaces.
It takes a minute or two to remove the offending file, depending on file size. Be patient...You're done!