Export & data portability

The open-export guarantee

You can export everything you put into CollabHub — datasets, notebooks, protocols, files — in open formats, on every tier, forever. Export is not a premium feature and never will be: it works on the free tier the same as on any other, and no plan change can lock your data in.

There are three lanes, and between them nothing is stranded: per-dataset export for your data tables, the account archive for your records, and ordinary file downloads for the original files you uploaded.

Export a dataset

Any tabular dataset (one whose source is CSV, TSV, Excel, or JSON) exports in four open formats: CSV, TSV, JSON, and XLSX.

1. Open the dataset from Datasets in the sidebar and choose an export format.
2. Hit Export. It runs in the background and the page tracks progress for you.
3. When it’s ready, download the file.

Download links are signed and expire after a while for safety — if one lapses, just run the export again. Automating a pipeline? The export API additionally accepts a specific dataset version and a subset of columns.

Datasets that aren’t row-and-column data (instrument files, images, structures, and so on) can’t be serialized as a table, so there’s no format to pick — you download the original file you uploaded, unchanged, from the dataset or from Files in the sidebar.

Export your whole account

For a complete copy of your records — profile, consents, workspaces, notebook entries with their full version history, datasets, experiments, observations, protocols, file listings, and your priority proofs — request a full archive from Settings → Data privacy. This is the GDPR data-portability export: it gathers your data into a single ZIP in the background and gives you a download link when it’s ready, with the request history listed right on the page.

The archive is machine-readable JSON (one combined export.json plus a file per section, and a README). It lists your datasets and files with their metadata rather than embedding the bytes — the actual data tables come from the per-dataset export above, and the original files download from Files. So the round trip is: archive for the record, exports and downloads for the payload.

The same page also handles account deletion requests, so your right to leave is as real as your right to export.

Why we work this way

Open export keeps us honest: CollabHub has to earn your lab’s work every day, not hold it hostage. It’s also good science — funders and journals increasingly expect data-management plans with real portability, and NIH/GDPR-ready data management is a core part of what CollabHub is for. Questions? Contact us or read the Data-Use Covenant.