External drive filling up with TM

I set up TM a few days ago and have been very happy with it until tonight when I realised that my external disk is filling up very quickly. Let me explain...
I have a 320GB Lacie disk with about 300GB actually available to use. After my first TM backup I was left with about 100GB spare - plenty I thought. However, after checking tonight I see I only have 60GB spare and yet I've hardly touched the computer and certainly not created any large files, at this rate the drive will be full in another week or so.
I'm guessing that in order for TM to go back in hourly increments it's saving duplicates of various files and this is what is filling up the drive. In the meantime I've turned TM off to only do manual backups a lot less regularly, but this is sort of defeating the purpose.
I have a folder on my external HD for every hourly backup TM has done, is it safe delete all but the most recent backup folder and start afresh?

OK, the Windows partition is now excluded. I've erased the disk and am going to start again. I've attempted to alter the TM .plist script as outlined here to alter the hourly back ups to daily...
'If you think Time Machine backs up too often (or not often enough) for your liking, navigate into /System » Library » LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Open it in your favorite text editor, and look for this section:
<key>StartInterval</key>
<integer>3600</integer>
Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, and you'll have changed Time Machine's backup interval.'
But I don't have permissions to alter and re-save the file even after tweaking permissions in the Get Info window. I think I'll leave TM to do it's hourly and then weekly archive an reassess the situation after that.

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