This is going to sound silly but here it goes. I did my first experiment using Qiime in my iMac at home. I want to be able to work with these files (at least the visuals) in my MacBook on the road. I do not plan to do classification or anything hefty, just want to have for example the qzv files and show those to people to get some input. I read I can export files, I read I can extract files. I am still unclear about the differences between those two methods and which one would be better to do what I want to do without messing with my original files (I still want to keep them intact in my iMac). Perhaps just copying the files to an external drive works and I am complicating things (which command would work for this?).
Hi @Kim_Lam_Chiok,
It sounds like you’re on the right track - export and extract could be used in certain situations, but in this case these commands may complicate things unnecessarily.
Unless you're exporting/extracting to work with your data in another system (e.g. to do some statistical analysis in R), q2view is probably the easiest way to display your results.
Displaying your work:
Even without installing QIIME 2 on your macbook, you can copy your .qza/.qzv files to it and use q2view to display your visualizations.
A note on security: q2view uses modern browser APIs to display your Visualizations and Artifacts locally, so sensitive data isn't being sent to a server. Details here.
Sharing your work:
If you're already using Dropbox for file storage, or if you host your files elsewhere on the web, q2view can also generate a "share" link so you can give remote collaborators easy view access to your results.
To do this, provide a link to to view your file....
...then find the "share" button in the top menu bar.
A note on extract and export:
I read I can export files, I read I can extract files. I am still unclear about the differences between those two methods
Both of these tools turn QIIME 2 Artifacts into directories of non-QIIME 2 files (e.g. html, tsv, etc.) The key difference between export and extract is that extract preserves artifact metadata (including provenance), while export does not.