Easy Way to Delete a Sparsebundle from Time Machine

Friday, February 7, 2014 by jusopi 29 Comments

I have had a Time Capsule in service for over 4 years. It has been used to backup my old personal mac, my current personal mac, 2 work macs and my mom’s mac. I’ve since updated from Snow Leopard all the way up to Mavericks, my old personal mac died (pre-solid alum body MBP 2008 era had known integrated video card issues, this one went through 2 of them), I’m no longer working for either of those companies and haven’t access to the computers and somehow my mom’s backups have been corrupted. So…. I need to kill 4 of the 5 sparsebundle files.

This solution is going to be super quick. You need to be comfortable with using the command line and have some patience. When you’re deleting several dozen GBs of data, things can be slow to start. Ok here are the steps:

understand that what you’re doing is not orthodox and that it’s irreversible. If you’re not comfortable with that idea, I’d not do this.
grab a ethernet cable
connect your computer to the Time Capsule (TC) with said cable
make sure you can see your TC from within a Finder view in the sidebar
open Terminal (either navigate to Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal or hit ⌘ + space to open Spotlight and type “terminal” and select Terminal from the list)
in terminal type:
```
cd /path/to/sparsebundle
```
in most cases it will be located here:
```
/Volumes/Data/Your.sparsebundle
```
If not you can type “cd” then from within the Finder, drag the sparsebundle into the terminal where it will fetch the path for you.
now the next step is where a little bit of patience is needed. Nothing sucks more than dealing with something you’ve been banging your head against for ages only to think you have a solution and it doesn’t even provide feedback. in terminal type:
```
find ./bands -print -delete
```
in some cases you may need to type:
```
sudo find ./bands -print -delete
```
which will prompt you for your password
this is basically getting a list of everything in the sparsebundle’s bands folder, prints it out in the terminal (which is your feedback to know SOMETHING is happening) and then it deletes them one by one. Keep in mind when you first do this, there may be an initial delay before you see any feedback. That is normal when working with large data sets.
you can now safely delete the sparsebundle without affecting another sparsebundle by typing:
```
cd ..
```
which backs us out of the current directory and then
```
rm -rf ./Your.sparsebundle
```

This should really go without saying, but I’m not responsible for any harm that comes to your computer, data, sanity, whatever from following these steps.