If you're truly religious about backing up your PC to an external drive, you can do without the lifeboat.zip file, but over the years we've seen quite a few posts in here that start like this: "My hard drive crashed and I didn't keep backups. Can I recover my projects from the albums on the server?" And the answer, without a lifeboat file, is "No. You're screwed."
In the case of Matrix (and a number of other skins), the lifeboat.zip file can get large if you've done things like adding music to the project, or adding background images (i.e. images other than the ones that you add in the main jAlbum Explore window), or using WOFF files for fonts. Those files get stashed with the other inputs to the album-building process, so they get swept up when the lifeboat file is created.
If you've changed things like music tracks, the ones you used to use are still lurking in the album project files, so it might be worthwhile to take a quick look, and delete any that you're no longer using in the album. Open the image directory - Tools, Open directories, Image directory - then take a look in the .jalbum subdirectory. If you see any MP3, JPG, or WOFF files that you're not currently using in the album, you can delete them. Just don't delete the ones that you are still using, or the album build might fail.
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