time machine questions

i use time maching with an external HD. here is my question. upon opening the backup folder on the time maching there appears to be many many many backups. can i go back and delete old ones or do they need to be there for some reason? how much space does each take up? a full backup is about 125gb btw.

The backups are incremental, meaning after it does the first full backup, each backup after that is only the files that have changed since the last backup.

Each folder is generally used for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly backups. It will delete them as it feels necessary.

Hope I explained it good enough for you.

thanks that helps. so..i dont need to delete old ones. i was afraid every folder was 125gb + yikes

You can delete them if you want to, it's really up to you. It won't hurt anything other than you not being able to backup from a long time ago