How can I tame Time Machine?

I have a single-user Mac with very few applications, only about 600 songs in iTunes and a very modest iPhoto library. Yet Time Machine, keeping 30 days of backups, nearly fills my 300 GB Passport external drive. On my Mac hard drive I only have a grand total of 45 GB of used space and 98% of that doesn't change, or if it does it's just a change, not more data. I don't even use Apple Mail...I use Gmail.
If very little is changing I don't see why Time Machine should using nearly 300 GB of space for 30 days worth of backups. How can I tame this beast? I'm tired of TechTool telling me I am running out of space on the Passport drive every few days.
In the past I've just manually deleted the old five or six days worth of T.M. backups, but that is another problem in itself. It takes Finder HOURS to delete the hundreds of thousands of files each time I do this. I like Time Machine, but I'm about ready to turn it off and go back to SuperDuper. Thanks for any ideas.

Larry McJunkin wrote:
I may not understand TM...but I've been in the computing business for 25 years and something like this just doesn't compute.
Welcome to the club! I've been at it about twice that long, and I'm here to tell you that Time Machine is a whole new sort of critter!
Under normal circumstances, it manages to do only incremental backups hourly, of what's been added or changed, but each backup is, in effect, a *full, complete copy of your entire system* at the time of that backup!
Even stranger, when it automatically deletes your oldest backups to make room for new ones, all the remaining backups are still, in effect, full, complete copies!
You might be interested in these:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/10/12/roadto_mac_os_x_leopard_timemachine.html
and: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14
and perhaps the Frequently Asked Questions post at the top of this forum.

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