Found Virus Bloodhound.PDF.20 on the time machine external drive, how to remove
When you delete a file, all the revisions go away, so you will want to first attack the file with the problem by deleting it.

If you can't delete it, move it to an external USB drive and then delete it.

At that point, you can let the scanner see if backup copies are still affected - but you are correct - you never want to use rm on backed up files. Delete them using the Time Machine interface to delete one file in all backups or one instance of one file or one backup instance. You can also use tmutil delete to remove snapshots from the backup drive.


How can I manually delete old backups to free space for Time Machine?