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Can renaming, copying, or moving the omics data file corrupt it?

Can renaming, copying, or moving the fastq files, bam/sam file, or reference genome file corrupts it. I am facing this issue of file corruption. What can be the cause and what I can do in order to fix the issue? Or I need to get the files again?

rna-seq genome next-gen sequencing alignment

4 answers

Doing anything (or even nothing) to a file can corrupt it if you have hardware or network problems. If there are no network or hardware problems (and no stray solar rays) then renaming/copying/moving any file shouldn't corrupt it.

Thank you for your reply. Is there any technique to know whether it is hardware, network, or stray solar rays problem?

I have used GATK and PICARD to validate SAM/BAM/ files.

Try to launch "samtools quickcheck" on your sam / bam file. It should give you more information about the issue.

That's well outside the purview of this site.

If you are making copies of a file, particularly if the copy is going to be downloaded off a server, then using md5sum will produce a hash (string of characters) that are unique to the file, and can be matched with the copy.

moving or copying large file in linux has a risk that files may get corrupted. Its is recommended to use Rsync which ensure data integrity in linux.

Another option if it's a very large file you don't want to move or duplicate, is to create soft/symbolic links (shortcuts) to the file, and then to operate on the shortcuts instead.

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