Clarification on Large Intermediate Files in data_augmentation Output Folder

[tiantianlili]

Dear developer,

Thank you very much for providing this powerful and well-documented tool. I have recently started working on metagenomic binning and have found your software extremely helpful.

However, I noticed that the data_augmentation folder generated during the binning process contains several intermediate files—such as depth files—that can take up a significant amount of disk space (some of them even exceed 10 GB). As a beginner, I would like to ask:

Are these intermediate files necessary for downstream analysis, or can they be safely deleted after the binning process is completed?

Could you please provide a detailed explanation of the purpose of the different output files generated by the software, especially those under the data_augmentation directory?

Any guidance or documentation on output file usage and cleanup would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you again for your excellent work!

Best regards

[yqy6611]

I've tried myself. We can gzip nearly all the files inside data_augmentation except for fasta and kmer files inside aug{0,1,2,3,4,5} folders, as well as datacoverage files.