[DEMUG] Format before refreshing for backup?

[Dick Atlee]

We have a backup hard drive that has "only" a 67Gig capacity, and the 
latest attempt to do an incremental backup resulted in a "not enough 
room" message.

The obvious next step (short of getting a new drive) is to clear it and 
start over with a full backup.  The question is, will simply trashing 
the exiting backup meta-files be sufficient, or would reformatting be 
appropriate to avoid some kind of fragmentation or other 
read/write-slowing situation.

And while I'm at it, does anyone know what happens with incremental 
backups when files are deleted between backups, and later a full 
restoration is done?  Is some record kept in an incremental backup of 
the fact that a file has disappeared (either deleted or renamed) since 
the last incremental backup, so that it will again be deleted during the 
restore, or does it simply show up because at one point it was backed up 
prior to deletion?

Thanks for any help on this.

Dick