"Backups" are taking up over 60 G on my MacBook Pro Do I need to keep these backups as I use a Lacie external drive to backup? How do I get rid of them on my computer?
NB: For the purpose of this answer, I will assume you are using Time Machine.

No, these are Time Machine's "Mobile Backups". You can disable them by running, from Terminal.app: (you may be prompted for your password)

sudo tmutil disablelocal    # disables local backups


and if the above command didn't remove the backups after a while, from Terminal.app: (you may be prompted for your password)

sudo rm -rf /Volumes/MobileBackups/Computer/*    # removes the large backup directory


Time Machine keeps local backups on your computer as indicated in its preference pane:




  Local snapshots as space permits


Although these local snapshots are deleted automatically, they can be responsible (and they are) for consuming a lot of disk space.