Thanks. Pretty much identical to erasing/reformatting a thumb drive (which I've done a couple times). I thought it might be more involved.

I haven't really gotten around to the mechanics of backups, since I'm still trying to discern what I might need and to what purpose I might put it/them.

Once hourly backups seems kind of excessive and obsessive. Why would one do that? Nothing that I do on the computer could possibly warrant that frequency, but then I still don't know to what use I would put such.