Is it safe to delete my Time Machine sparse bundle? Can a fresh one be recreated? Is it safe to delete my Time Machine sparse bundle file? Can a fresh time machine backup be recreated WITHOUT reformatting the drive or affecting any other files on my external Time Machine drive?

My time machine backups stopped a month ago and nothing I do will get the backups to continue as usual.  The drive is 25% full.  I don't know what to do.  The way I look at it, the best option might be to delete the sparse bundle entirely and just start a fresh sparse bundle, right?   This seems logical to me but I cannot find any advice anywhere to affirm my belief.

I am afraid to choose the "Delete backup disk" option in the Time Machine applet because, while I want it to delete my sparse bundle, I am afraid it will take the liberties of deleting all content on the "drive".   That would be disastrous since I also use the drive for a important file share.   I'm also afraid to delete the sparse bundle because I don't know exactly how it works.

Can anyone provide advice?  I cannot find any advice on this specific subject anwhere.
As long as you don't care about anything in the backup being gone, yes it is safe to remove the sparsebundle.

Disable Time Machine first. Instead of deleting the whole bundle at once:


Right-click and choose Show Package Contents.
Open the bands folder.
Select a large number of bands (8000 at a time seems to be good from what I read) and move those to the trash.
Repeat until all bands have been deleted, then delete the main sparsebundle file.