Data Storage

Local Storage

All Flow-By-Activity and Flow-By-Sector files generated via FLOWSA or downloaded from Data Commons are stored in a user's local directory. To check where the files are stored, run the following code in the python console:
import appdirs
appdirs.user_data_dir()

Troubleshooting

Ensure you have 4 folders within your local directory:

1. flowsa/Bibliography
2. flowsa/FlowByActivity
3. flowsa/FlowBySector
4. flowsa/Log

Remote Storage

Final Flow-By-Activity and Flow-By-Sector output files for each version of flowsa are stored on Data Commons, an Amazon AWS s3 server. Data files are stored in parquet format, as this file type is smaller and faster to read than traditional file types, such as a csv. Please refer to this example on how to read a parquet and convert to a csv.

Storing files on a remote server enables use of these files by other tools, such as useeior, without requiring a user to have python installed.