| save {base} | R Documentation |
save writes an external representation of R objects to the
specified file. The objects can be read back from the file at a later
date by using the function load (or data in some cases).
save.image() is just a short-cut for ‘save my current
workspace’,
i.e., save(list = ls(all=TRUE), file = ".RData"). It is also what
happens with q("yes").
save(..., list = character(),
file = stop("'file' must be specified"),
ascii = FALSE, version = NULL, envir = parent.frame(),
compress = !ascii, compression_level,
eval.promises = TRUE, precheck = TRUE)
save.image(file = ".RData", version = NULL, ascii = FALSE,
compress = !ascii, safe = TRUE)
... |
the names of the objects to be saved (as symbols or character strings). |
list |
A character vector containing the names of objects to be saved. |
file |
a (writable binary-mode) connection or the name of the
file where the data will be saved (when tilde expansion
is done). Must be a file name for |
ascii |
if |
version |
the workspace format version to use. |
envir |
environment to search for objects to be saved. |
compress |
logical or character string specifying whether saving
to a named file is to use compression. |
compression_level |
integer: the level of compression to be
used. Defaults to |
eval.promises |
logical: should objects which are promises be forced before saving? |
precheck |
logical: should the existence of the objects be checked before starting to save (and in particular before opening the file/connection)? Does not apply to version 1 saves. |
safe |
logical. If |
The names of the objects specified either as symbols (or character
strings) in ... or as a character vector in list are
used to look up the objects from environment envir. By default
promises are evaluated, but if eval.promises = FALSE
promises are saved (together with their evaluation environments).
(Promises embedded in objects are always saved unevaluated.)
All R platforms use the XDR (bigendian) representation of C ints and doubles in binary save-d files, and these are portable across all R platforms. (ASCII saves used to be useful for moving data between platforms but are now mainly of historical interest. They can be more compact than binary saves where compression is not used, but are almost always slower to both read and write: binary saves compress much better than ASCII ones.)
Default values for the ascii, compress, safe and
version arguments can be modified with the
"save.defaults" option (used both by save and
save.image), see also the ‘Examples’ section. If a
"save.image.defaults" option is set it is used in preference to
"save.defaults" for function save.image (which allows
this to have different defaults).
A connection that is not already open will be opened in mode
"wb".
Large files can be reduced considerably in size by compression. A
particular 46MB dataset was saved as 35MB without compression in 2
seconds, 22MB with gzip compression in 8 secs, 19MB with
bzip2 compression in 13 secs and 9.4MB with xz
compression in 40 secs. The load times were 1.3, 2.8, 5.5 and 5.7
seconds respectively. These results are indicative, but the relative
performances do depend on the actual file and xz did
unusually well here.
It is possible to compress later (with gzip, bzip2
or xz) a file saved with compress = FALSE: the effect
is the same as saving with compression. Also, a saved file can be
uncompressed and re-compressed under a different compression scheme
(and see resaveRdaFiles for a way to do so from within R).
The ... arguments only give the names of the objects
to be saved: they are searched for in the environment given by the
envir argument, and the actual objects given as arguments need
not be those found.
Saved R objects are binary files, even those saved with
ascii = TRUE, so ensure that they are transferred without
conversion of end of line markers and of 8-bit characters. The lines
are delimited by LF on all platforms.
Although the default version has not changed since R 1.4.0, this does not mean that saved files are necessarily backwards compatible. You will be able to load a saved image into an earlier version of R unless use is made of later additions (for example, raw vectors or external pointers).
The most common reason for failure is lack of write permission in the
current directory. For save.image and for saving at the end of
a session this will shown by messages like
Error in gzfile(file, "wb") : unable to open connection
In addition: Warning message:
In gzfile(file, "wb") :
cannot open compressed file '.RDataTmp',
probable reason 'Permission denied'
The defaults were changed to use compressed saves for save in
2.3.0 and for save.image in 2.4.0. Any recent version of R
can read compressed save files, and a compressed file can be
uncompressed (by gzip -d) for use with very old versions of R.
file can be a UTF-8-encoded filepath that cannot be translated to
the current locale.
For other interfaces to the underlying serialization format, see
serialize and saveRDS.
x <- stats::runif(20)
y <- list(a = 1, b = TRUE, c = "oops")
save(x, y, file = "xy.RData")
save.image()
unlink("xy.RData")
unlink(".RData")
# set save defaults using option:
options(save.defaults=list(ascii=TRUE, safe=FALSE))
save.image()
unlink(".RData")