Time Machine is normally reliable, but if it gets into trouble your off in the weeds pretty quickly. Over on my iMac this morning, I noticed that backups were failing. Sure enough, my old friend, an "inProgress" directory was there. This one isn't doing a network backup though; I'm not really sure what caused the hiccup.

Either way, the stupid directory wouldn't delete - not with sudo in a shell, not via the Finder, nothing. Looking around the internet, I found a suggestion: you not only have to turn Time Machine off, you might need to reboot to get the system to believe that no one is using the file. Sigh. Reboot the Mac.

When it came back up (blissfully quickly), I selected the file in Finder, and it immediately prompted me for permission (which it wasn't doing before I rebooted). That tossed it in the trash, and from there I was able to empty the trash without any problem. That's a bug, and something that I'm sure drives people who run into it nuts.

Oh, and per the thought I had last time something like this happened, I tried renaming the directory. No dice there either, at least not before a reboot.

Now Listening to: Wonder by Natalie Merchant from: Live In Concert

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