What is taking up all the room on my 160GB HD? And what is safe to delete?

I am new to Mac, and have a Macbook Pro, OSX 10.5.8, with a HD of 160GB. I use an external HD to back up my Home Folder and for Time Machine (which may be redundant, not sure). I use iDisk to back up my Personal Data and Settings.
There is a HUUUUGE (76GB!) file of backups on my Mac HD, which is probably the backup Home files from Time Machine before I began using an external HD for backups.
Questions:
What files on the Mac HD are safe to delete, and what is the best way to do so? (Backup files, logs, anything else to free up HD space?)
If I'm using an Ext HD (500GB) for Time Machine, do I ALSO need to back up my Home Folder there, too?
And should I use a completely separate ext HD to back up my OSX? I have not yet backed this up.
Random question: what is a .dmg file, and
Thanks for any help. I may be over-doing the backups, but coming from a PC world, where pressing one button makes things go "poof", I don't mind some redundancy.

Keysfins,
First let's remember that 160GB is not a very large HD by today's standards. If you are intending to use your MBP for items that take up a lot of HD space such as photos, video or music then I think it would be wise to either upgrade the drive to a larger drive or to store that information on a second external HD. I would not recommend deleting any of the files on your internal HD with the exception of data files you may have already created.
When you use TM the first time it will back up 100% of the internal drive, after that it backs up just files that have been added or changed so you Home Folder is backed up automatically and yes they should be.
You can also get another external HD for creating a bootable clone, these are useful if the internal drive has a fatal crash. With a bootable clone this gives the peace of mind that if you do have a fatal crash you can be up and running in minutes. In order to create a bootable clone you would need either SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner. Both apps do the same thing however SuperDuper is $28 and offers support for that price where CCC is free with no support. The difference between a cloned drive and TM is that TM creates hourly backups and is not a bootable drive whereas a cloned drive is a snapshot in time (you choose when) of the internal drive and is bootable. Many people (including myself) use both TM and a bootable clone, it just depends on your level of paranoia regarding backups. There is an excellent article in MacWorld that talks about back up strategies based on your degree of worry. The link for that article is here.
Last a .dmg file is a disk image file, in short when you get a new application (like CCC, SuperDuper etc...) you will probably receive them as a .dmg file. Here is an article that gives you a little more information if you are interested.
Regards,
Roger

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