How do I safely delete old entries in Time Machine?

Hi All,
I recently did my first ever Time Machine back up prior to upgrading my OSX to 10.8 from 10.6.8.
A few weeks on, all is working fine with no conflicts.
Yesterday I upgraded Aperture from 2 to 3.  I know that Time Machine doesn't copy the entire library file on each back-up, just the changes, but with the recent upgrade it has changed a fair bit and used quite a chunk of disk space (200GB).
Once I've been in to the new Aperture 3 upgrade and am satisfied that its running fine with no conflicts, I'll have no need for the Aperture 2 library back-up, as I no longer use the application.
My question is:  Can I delete all older Time Machine entries until the first back up after the upgrade to Aperture 3.  Will this still preserve all data on the library?  There's not that many as I back up manually not hourly.  Sorry if that's a basic question, I'm completely new to TM and not sure precisely how it works with upgrades from one Aperture library to another.
Thanks for your help.
Richard

You just described one reason it's a bad idea to use a single volume for Time Machine backups and other content. Time Machine expects to use the entire volume. It will respect the other content and not erase it, but you will eventually be left with zero free space.
Edit to add: When that occurs, Time Machine will erase older backups to make room for newer ones, but the problem is that once there is no free space remaining on the backup volume you cannot copy anything else to it. This certainly precludes using Time Machine to back up whatever non-Time Machine content exists on that volume. You would have to erase the source content first, after which Time Machine will eventually erase its backup as well.
You cannot limit the backup size without limiting the volume size. To do that you must partition it. That is not ideal either, since loss of the drive means losing both partitions.
Message was edited by: John Galt

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