Deleting Backups For More Space, or Starting Over?

Hi Folks,
I have a 1TB FW external connected to my MacHDD 1TB on my iMac 27. My current backups go back to June 2010, and my TM now getting full.
Can I just go in to the backups folder and delete June 2010-Oct 2010 to free up some space on my TM or would it be better to just Erase and start new?
My 1TB MacHDD has about 400G free space and my TM now has only about 149G free.
I'd like to keep at least about 6 months of data backed up, but probably don't need most of it anymore.
Thanks for any comments/suggestions.

Are you aware that TM will remove old backups automatically to make space for new ones? See the following:
About TM "Backup Drive is Full" Alert
TM only deletes older files if they have been deleted from the source and when TM needs space on the backup drive for a new incremental backup. Time Machine "thins" it's backups; hourly backups over 24 hours old, except the first of the day; those "daily" backups over 30 days old, except the first of the week. The weeklies are kept as long as there's room.
So, how long a backup file remains depends on how long it was on your Mac before being deleted, assuming you do at least one backup per day. If it was there for at least 24 hours, it will be kept for at least a month. If it was there for at least a week, it will be kept as long as there's room.
Note, that on a Time Capsule the sparsebundle grows in size as needed, but doesn't shrink. Thus, from the user's view of the TC it appears that no space has been freed, although there may be space in the sparsebundle.
Once TM has found it cannot free up enough space for a new backup it reports the disk is full. You can either erase the backup drive and start your backups anew or replace the drive with a larger drive.
Now, once TM does announce the disk is full you can install a larger drive, erase the drive and start over, or use the TM application to selectively remove backups you no longer need to maintain.
Do not use the Finder to delete backups from the TM backup drive. The proper way to remove backups is to use the TM application. In this way all the indices will be properly adjusted to reflect changes. Were you to use the Finder then TM would need to rebuild all the indices which could take hours or days depending on how much data are on the drive.

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