[WOPR]

I backup to my external LaCie drive, and noticed that I'd lost about 40gb of space. When I searched for invisible files I found over 17,000 old backup files using up the space. How do I clear this or should I just reformat? Even when logged in as root I can't delete the files.

Any help appreciated!

Oh, and the files aren't in the trash can as such so I can't force empty it using Cocktail for example.

[Big Mac]

If you cannot do it from root, I doubt there is a way to do it. It may be a good idea to backup and reformat. You know, since .Trashes holds trash from volumes other than your boot drive, you may have an external drive that is not mounted with a bunch of trash being listed in .Trashes. If that is the case, then you cannot delete those files for good reason - they don't exist on that drive. If you use external drives that is what I would suspect.