Mobile Backups on mac taking up 1/3 of disk space

Hello,
So I was just cleaning up my mac. I went to 'about this mac' under the apple on finder, and went to storage. It says that backups are taking up 145.16GB of disk space. What does it mean by backups? Can I get rid of them? I do have time machine set up, but I dont get why it is taking up so much space.
Thanks for your help!!
Have macbook pro 2012 running OSX 10.10

When Time Machine backs up a portable Mac, some of the free space will be used to make local snapshots, which are backup copies of recently deleted files. The space occupied by local snapshots is reported as available by the Finder, and should be considered as such. In the Storage display of System Information, local snapshots are shown as Backups. The snapshots are automatically deleted when they expire or when free space falls below a certain level. You ordinarily don't need to, and should not, delete local snapshots yourself.

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Mobile Backups on mac taking up 1/3 of disk space

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