Setting up my mac from time machine left me with a large backup file on my macbook

I just bought a new Macbook Air and decided to set things up from my latest time machine backup. I'm glad to have my settings back, but it also left me with 30 gigs worth of backups. This wouldn't be so bad, except that I only have 128 gigs of hard drive space, and I supposedly have only 30 gigs left. Is there any way I can safely remove these large files without losing everything again?

In Lion and Mountain Lion, Time Machine creates local snapshots on the internal hard disk > http://pondini.org/TM/30.html
You don't have to worry about snapshots, as they are deleted when your Mac's disk is full. Anyway, you can disable them or delete them by opening System Preferences > Time Machine and turning off Time Machine, but you don't need to do this

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