How do I quickly delete time machine backups

Hmm … I finally got round to trying to erase the partition. I got the dreaded "Erase process has failed. Click Done to continue." I then tried reformatting the entire (external, back-up) HDD. Same message.

Any other ideas?

Aha. I finally managed to reformat the drive, first as a single volume (no partitions). Then as two partitions.

This process wiped out everything on one of the partitions (a clone of my internal drive). But the Time Machine back-ups remain on the other partition. Argh!

Surely it must be possible to remove the Time Machine files?

I can't erase the entire device, and can't erase the Time Machine partition. I can remove the non-Time Machine partition so that I have a single volume. But the area taken up by Time Machine files is untouchable. It's as if Time Machine has bricked half the HDD.

I did as you say. But I'm pretty sure the problem is with the Time Machine files. They are hard enough to delete at the best of times, who knows why.

I may well just shrink the T-M partition so at least I have as much of the HDD as possible available for other stuff.

Maybe so. I find Time Machine a bit opaque.

By the way it was your suggestion of possible drive failure that set me on the way to the fix. Instead of drive failure, I thought perhaps file corruption. I tried First Aid but it told me I couldn't repair corrupt files unless I started in recovery mode. Not sure if it ever found dodgy files — my guess is it did — but at any rate it completed its process successfully.

Thanks for that, Barney!

I tried that. I get the message that the erase process has failed. It only works on the partition that doesn't have Time Machine backup files.

I have a fix! I restarted in recovery mode and was then able to erase.

Thanks very much for your suggestions, Barney.