title: How to save a data frame in R
body: <p>According to the answer to <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8345759/how-to-save-a-data-frame-in-r">this question</a>, you can save a data frame "foo" in R with the save() function as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>save(foo,file="data.Rda")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Here is data frame "df":</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; str(df)
  'data.frame':   1254 obs. of  2 variables
  $ text : chr  "RT @SchmittySays: I love this 1st grade #science teacher from #Duluth http://t.co/HWDYFnIyqV  #NSTA15 #AlbertEinstein #inspirat"| __truncated__ "RT @KVernonBHS: @smrtgrls would love Stellar Girls. Empowering female scientists rocks! #NSTA15 http://t.co/1ZU0yjVF67" "RT @leducmills: Leaving #SXSWedu to go straight to #NSTA15. There should be some sort of arbitrary conference-hopper social med"| __truncated__ "RT @KRScienceLady: Congrats to a wonderful colleague who  helped #ngss Bcome reality, Stephen Pruitt, Distinguished Service to "| __truncated__ ...
  $ group: Factor w/ 2 levels "narst","nsta": 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 ...
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It seems to save fine:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; save(df, file = "~/downloads/df.Rda")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But it turns out only the name of the object saved:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt; df1 &lt;- load("~/downloads/df.Rda")
  &gt; str(df1)
  chr "df"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried the saveRDS() function suggested in another answer to the same question referenced above which worked fine, but I'd like to know why save() isn't working. </p>