# Best practice for storing data in Packages

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-for-storing-data-in-packages/36808>\
**Category:** Data\
**Created:** [March 31, 2020, 6:00pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-for-storing-data-in-packages/36808 "2020-03-31T18:00:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
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**Author:** ![oxinabox](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/oxinabox/32/206603_2.png) [@oxinabox](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/oxinabox)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2020, 6:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/best-practice-for-storing-data-in-packages/36808/4 "2020-03-31T18:22:19Z")

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An alternative to Artifacts is [DataDeps.jl](https://github.com/oxinabox/DataDeps.jl).  
Either a normal datadep, with the data stored externally, e.g. on FigShare or Zenodo.  
Or a `ManualDataDep` which will work for data stored in `<project>/deps/data`  
(or you can put instructions on how to manually load the data.)

DataDeps lets you avoid worrying about where the data is stored,  
because instead of writing things like `./../data/GoodData`  
you write `datadep"GoodData"` and it resolves to a string tht is the file path  
(can also do `datadepp"GoodData/myfile.csv` etc)

IIRC you can do similar with artifacts using `artifact"GoodData"` but I am not 100% sure

There are number of pros and cons between Artifacts and DataDeps.  
One pro of DataDeps is it works with julia 1.0.x (the LTS) not just with 1.3+  
the others are around being more flexible for transport (can use a secure download e.g. AWSS3.jl, GoogleDrive.jl), and have post-fetch methods for unpacking random archieves (not just tarballs)  
Downside of DataDeps is Artifacts use content addressing which is really clever and means it is basiclly impossibly to run into a name collision.  
Artifacts also know how to clean themselves up when not needed anymore

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