Summary
Our premium features (available in Genozip Premium) are designed to address the business needs of organizations that send or receive genomic files to or from their clients, as well as organizations that are subject to stringent compliance requirements.
Receiving compressed files from your clients
Allowing your clients to compress their files with Genozip before sending them to you, not only saves you and your clients storage space and networking costs, it also slashes upload times for your clients and hence increases their satisfaction with your service.
Here's how it works:
Step 1: Provide your client with your license number. The license number can be found with genozip --license.
Step 2: Your client compresses their files with the --sendto option along with your license number, for example:
genozip --sendto 345312423 mysample-R1.fq.gz mysample-R2.fq.gz --pair --reference hs37d5.fa.gz
Step 3: When receiving a file from your client, you can process it directly in your pipeline using genocat, or uncompress it using genounzip.
Files compressed with --sendto are locked and may be accessed only by the Genozip Premium installation with specified license number.
Your clients will not require a paid Genozip license to use genozip --sendto, even for commercial use – effectively, you are extending your own Genozip license to your clients.
If sharing files onwards to other external users is desired, the lock can be removed with genocat --unlock.
Sending compressed files to your clients
Replacing legacy .gz or .bam / .cram compression with modern Genozip compression could save you and your clients considerable storage and networking costs, as well as slash the download time your clients are experiencing, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.
Uncompressing Genozip files is always free.
With Genozip Premium, you are permitted to distribute Genozip itself to your clients. In fact, if using the --tar option, we already take care of that - the tar file will also include a copy of the Genozip executables (adding a negligible 4 MB overhead):
genozip --tar client.tar --reference hs37d5.fa.gz data.R1.fq.gz data.R2.fq.gz data.bam data.vcf.gz
tar tvf client.tar
-rwxr-xr-x divon/divon 4226640 2024-01-22 06:28 genozip-linux-x86_64/genozip
hrwxr-xr-x divon/divon 0 2024-01-22 06:28 genozip-linux-x86_64/genocat
hrwxr-xr-x divon/divon 0 2024-01-22 06:28 genozip-linux-x86_64/genounzip
hrwxr-xr-x divon/divon 0 2024-01-22 06:28 genozip-linux-x86_64/genols
-rwxr-xr-x divon/divon 14193072850 2024-01-22 06:28 data.bam.genozip
-rwxrwxr-x divon/divon 6266006155 2024-01-22 06:28 data.R1.fq.genozip
-rwxrwxr-x divon/divon 9345680255 2024-01-22 06:28 data.R2.fq.genozip
-rwxrwxr-x divon/divon 106624109 2024-01-22 06:28 data.vcf.genozip
With Genozip Premium, we provide the additional --user-message option which allows you specify a message of your choice that will be displayed to your clients when they uncompress the file. Examples could be: additional information regarding this specific file ; information regarding how to access techincal support ; marketing information regarding the services you offer.
genozip --user-message msg.txt mysample-R1.fq.gz mysample-R2.fq.gz --pair --reference hs37d5.fa.gz
In this example, msg.txt is a file that contains the message that will be baked into the compressed file. It may be of any length, any number of lines, and using any alphabet and language (technically: ASCII or UTF-8 format).
Another use case for the --tar option: If your business is such that your clients normally receive from you a large number of files in each delivery, Genozip allows you to package these files into a single standard tar file. Genozip produces the tar file directly as the output of the compression, removing the extra step of creating the tar file separately. For example:
genozip --tar client-X-sequencing-delivery.tar --subdirs --reference hs37d5.fa.gz client-X
This command will output a tar file, into which it will compress the directory client-X, including all its files and sub-directories, maintaining the directory structure. It will compress not only the FASTQ, BAM and VCF files, but all other files as well. The command line option --reference is, well, optional - and will result in significantly better compression if provided.
If running the Linux version of Genozip, the tar file will also include a copy of the Genozip executables (adding a negligible 4 MB overhead).
Security & encryption
Many organizations and research projects need to comply with security and privacy requirements in regards to their genomic data.
These days, news about system security breaches has become routine. It is simply not acceptable anymore to rely solely on the system defenses against intruders, and it is critical to protect the data itself too.
Genozip offers an easy way to encrypt the data while compressing it. The data is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This is the same encryption method routinely used to protect financial transactions and other sensitive data. Genozip uses the strongest version of AES - 256 bits.
Encryption and decryption are done by simply providing a password during compression and uncompression, for example:
genozip --password mysecret000@ myfile.bam
genounzip --password mysecret000@ myfile.bam.genozip
Behind the scenes, Genozip uses the password to generate an AES encryption key, that is then used to encrypt the data during compression or decrypt it during uncompression. The password, and the key derived from it, are not stored anywhere, and there is no way to recover them if they are lost. This means that even if someone successfully breaks into your computer, they still cannot read your data.
The performance overhead of encrypting while compressing is negligible - there is no noticable difference in speed.
Providing your clients with the Genozip software
For your clients to compress files with genozip --sendto or alternatively uncompress files you send them, they may install the standard Genozip software from our website. However, to improve their customer experience, you may include the Genozip software as genozip-linux-x86_64.tar with the files you send to your client. At 1.6 MB, its size is negligible so it can easily be included with every data delivery.
Extending your technical support from us to your clients
As a Premium license holder, we provide you with first-priority technical support.
Our technical support to you, extends to your clients as well - your clients may contact us for any technical issues regarding sending you files using --sendto, or uncompressing files received from you.
Questions? support@genozip.com