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I had a external hard drive in use for Time machine, but now use a different one, so wanted to free up the space. I removed the HD from the Time machine backup drives, then deleted the Backups.backupdb folder on the external HD. Yet when I view the HD’s "free space", for example in Disk Utility, the drive is still completely full without having freed up the ~500GB the backups took.

How can I get that space to free up?

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    Did you empty the Trash?
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Sep 29, 2018 at 15:43
  • ...or reformat the drive?
    – Steve Chambers
    Commented Sep 29, 2018 at 17:42
  • @Tetsujin thanks, that did it! It’s just not intuitive... you see nothing in the Trash, so why would you have to empty it? Once I plugged the drive and emptied Trash it took some 5 hours (because over USB I suppose) to empty the Trash, but now the drive has the free space.
    – kontur
    Commented Sep 30, 2018 at 9:46
  • @Tetsujin Feel free to submit that as answer and I'll accept it. It is simple stupid, but I did not get it, so it might be helpful to others as well.
    – kontur
    Commented Sep 30, 2018 at 9:47

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After comments - it's odd that it didn't appear in Trash, but generally, Trash won't empty itself so after you throw anything out you need to empty it to free up the space.

Apple did add a "Remove items from Trash after 30 days" Finder pref in [I think] Sierra, but that wouldn't have helped in this instance.

enter image description here

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    I reckon with there being hundreds of thousands of files it might simply not have showed up just yet when viewing the Trash.
    – kontur
    Commented Oct 1, 2018 at 10:03

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