Time Machine flooding my external hD

This thing is just the most useless softwear ever. I have a 1T external hard drive partitioned 2/3 for back up 1/3 for other.
I did my first backup and then the hourly ones started running. the preferences says I have about 3T on my hard drive which of course can't happen on a 1T drive unless there is some magic going on here. I have a 6 G backup partition.  Preferences says I only have 12M left after a singel back up. Isn't the software supposed to do incremental back ups. Why is the backup external drive full up? How can I make sure Time Machine does incremental backups not a full backup every hour?

ooops, forgot to say only 2G of my iMac HD has been used.

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