Qiime backup files

Hello there,

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?).

Thank you for your patience.

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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....

Q2View%20Dropbox

...then find the "share" button in the top menu bar.
Q2View%20Share

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.

:crossed_fingers: Hope this helps! :crossed_fingers:
Chris and @turanoo

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