Erase drive and start new backup

First, my "My Book Live is completely full. My hard drive crashed and I was able to restore the data on my new hard drive. Most of the programs had to be reinstalled as they did not get backed up. I now want to erase the entire drive and completely redo the backup. If I reformat the drive using the utilities, does the backup software remain on the drive so that the complete backup will automatically start up again.