Backup strategies will typically specify the length of time a backup should be kept. This is called a backup retention policy. Once the retention time has been exceeded then the backup becomes obselete and the media may be overwritten or backup removed. This process can become inefficient and difficult to maintain if it has to managed by an individual manually.

SBAdmin provides a feature for managing your backup retention policies. Backups written to tape will never be overwritten until their retention policy has been exceeded, and disk space will be automatically recovered when disk backups have expired.