A while back I tried to delete a bunch of backups from Time Machine using the good old-fashioned Finder and discovered that was a really, really bad idea. And OS X lets you do it without a whimper. To recover, I had to reformat the backup drive and start all over.

There is a right way to delete old backups in case you need to free up some space on your backup drive. Unfortunately it's not intuitive and it's well-hidden in a contextual menu. Here's a screencast to show you how to do it.

You might be saying to yourself, hey, was this feature written by the Windows Vista team? That's a good question. If you find the answer, let me know.