Managing archive logs

I'm at a site where we have oracle archive logs to deal with and I'd like to be able to remove these big suckers after we've done a cold backup. However, our backups are fully automated and I'm a little nervous about deleting these automagically. My concern is that the backup might fail and the archive logs would be deleted...

How do other sites handle this? Have you developed an automated means of doing this? Is there any software or tools that you recommend?

My one thought right now is to create a file to use as a timestamp when Oracle is started up after a level 0 backup and then, after the backup has been examined by a human eyeball, is to delete any archive logs older than the timestamp file. Does that sound reasonable?

I'm not an Oracle DBA though I play one on TV. I'm actually just a Unix system administrator. Your help is hugely appreciated!

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