US Patent 7596586 System and method for extended media retention

The present invention provides systems and methods for extending media retention. Methods are provided in which a set of aging preferences are obtained. Data elements of a data set stored on storage media are evaluated against the aging preferences to determine whether each of the data elements satisfy the aging preferences. Each of the data elements that is determined to satisfy the aging preferences is aged. Aging can include freeing a portion of storage media, previously used to store a data element, for other storage usage.