Fastest way to delete all Timemachine Backups for a machine What is the recommended way to get rid of a whole TimeMachine archive (aka Backups.backupdb)? 

Using Disk Utility to erase the whole disk is not an option.

I moved everything to the Trash, but "preparing to empty trash" was counting files to delete forever. I cancelled at -100,000 files.   

So what's the recommended way to delete huge amounts of files?
If you've got:


  Operation Not Permitted


after executing

sudo rm -rf Backups.backupdb


you should follow this approach, which is adding bypass before the remove command:

sudo /System/Library/Extensions/TMSafetyNet.kext/Contents/Helpers/bypass rm -rfv Backups.backupdb