OK, here is what I learned from Amit.

He is still generating these files, but hopes to start analyzing them on
Friday.  Once he has finished with the analysis he can delete most of them,
but would like to write them to tape, or some other permanent backup in case
he needs to do more work with them.  He said that if needed he can
re-generate the files, but it has taken almost three weeks to generate them,
so he would rather not have to do that.

Does this help with management of the backups?  Any thoughts on how to
provide a long-term/permanent backup of the files (Robin has already
suggested an external hard drive)?  

If you need any more info or want to make changes to how these files are
backed up and want to make sure Amit is OK with them, let me know or just
e-mail him directly.

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Research Computing Support [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of Steve Moore
Sent: Wednesday, May 09, 2007 9:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Backing up Matlab files

My short question is: do we need to backup matlab files?  Dr. 
Shukla's job (which I presume is matlab) has generated about 2 
terabytes of .mat files recently.  This is causing space and 
performance problems on our primary backup server.  If no one knows 
the answer I will contact Matlab.

Steve Moore
Senior Software Coordinator
Miami University
113 B Hoyt Hall
Oxford, OH 45056
email: [log in to unmask]
voice: 513-529-1452
fax: 513-529-9665