I’m very indebted to the ff and ffbase packages in R.  Without them, I probably would have to use some less savoury stats program for my bigger data analysis projects that I do at work.

Since I started using ff and ffbase, I have resorted to saving and loading my ff dataframes using ffsave and ffload.  The syntax isn’t so bad, but the resulting process it puts your computer through to save and load your ff dataframe is a bit cumbersome.  It takes a while to save and load, and ffsave creates (by default) a bunch of randomly named ff files in a temporary directory.

For that reason, I was happy to come across a link to a pdf presentation (sorry, I’ve lost it now) summarizing some cool features of ffbase.  I learned that instead of using ffsave and ffload, you can use save.ffdf and load.ffdf, which have very simple syntax:

save.ffdf(ffdfname, dir=”/PATH/TO/STORE/FF/FILES”)

Use that, and it creates a directory wherein it stores ff files that bear the same names as your column names from your ff dataframe!  It also stores an .RData and .Rprofile file as well.  Then there is:

load.ffdf(dir=”/PATH/TO/STORE/FF/FILES”)

As simple as that, you load your files, and you’re done!  I think what I like about these functions is that they allow you to easily choose where the ff files are stored, removing the worry about important files being in your temporary directory.

Store your big data!!