Problems with saving large workspace

Sometimes when I have a quite large workspace - e.g. a table with 8.5 million rows and 27 columns, Matlab has problems saving it.

A very small file appears but the program does not succeed in saving the workspace - no warning or anything.

Yesterday I just waited, and hours later I got a strange error message saying the file did not exist.

This is severely annoying, because I have to regenerate data that takes to to generate a lot of times.

I'm running Matlab R2018b, but I think this has been happening for a couple of versions back.

Suggestions?

Edit: So trying again I noticed something really weird happens.

It starts saving, and I can see the size of the file to which I try to save grow... then at some point I hear a chime sound from Windows, and the file size goes back to zero and then starts growing again.

Edit2: When using the save-command I get the following error msg:

"Error using save

Error closing file R:\MATLAB data\Christian\ftard.mat.

The file may be corrupt."

Answer 1

[Fangjun Jiang]

You might consider Tall Arrays

web(fullfile(docroot, 'matlab/import_export/tall-arrays.html'))

Answer 2

[Walter Roberson]

save with the -v7.3 option.