Emptying Trash

MancRog Said:

"I use an external drive to backup using TimeMachine. On one occasion it said drive was full so I looked at the drive and deleted a bunch of old backups.... this may have been as mistake as they are now in Trash and I'm struggling to get rid of them from there. The computer has also become unstable (frequent crashes for first time ever though still 110Gb free disk space)."

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Plug the Hard Drive Back In:

If you have deleted these, well then they could be very large-sized files. So, to delete these, plug the hard drive back into the Mac. It might take a bit, but the deletion will get done one after the other.

If you attempted to delete Time Machine files via Finder, they will always get stuck in Trash. If you disconnect your TM drive you'll notice that they vanish, but if you then plug it back in they will return to the Trash. The easiest and fastest solution is to reformat your Time Machine drive and start over.

MancRig Said:

“thanks to everyone who helped with this. Combination of Boot into Recovery Mode followed by re-connecting the external drive and a bit of patience seems to have solved the problem and MacOs back to being stable as it normally is.“

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You’re Welcome!

Great! I’m glad your all set! Patience paid off! And I’m glad to have helped!

See if this article can help: If you can't empty the Trash on your Mac - Apple Support