Q: How can I back up or archive all my Athena files before my account is deactivated?

Answer

This article is about backing up the files and data in your MIT Kerberos account. If you are interested in backing up your e-mail, please see How can I back up or archive all my email before my account is deactivated?

The easiest way to back up or archive your files is to transfer them to your personal computer using secure file transfer software. Once they are on your personal computer, you can back them up to other media.

You can also plug a USB disk drive into any Athena workstation and transfer the files that way. The disk drive must be formatted with the FAT32 filesystem, or have at least one FAT32 partition on the drive. Small USB drives (up to 80 GB) generally come preformatted as FAT32. Larger drives may be formatted as NTFS (for Windows) or HFS/HFS+ (for Mac) and will need reformatting or re-partitioning. Consult the documentation that came with your drive for information on the drive's filesystem and partitioning.

Please note that there are many specialized applications on Athena that are not available for Mac or PC or cost a lot of money. For example, even if you transfer MATLAB and Maple files from your Athena account, you would need a copy of MATLAB or Maple to use those files. Another option for preserving some work may be to open the documents on Athena and choose the "Print to PDF" option available in many applications. This will generate a PDF file of the finished product which can be viewed on any operating system, but won't allow you to edit the data. You can of course also print hard copies on paper.