My old qbase+ experiments, finally open from anywhere

I keep getting variations of the same email.

A researcher opens an old qbase+ project, say from 2021, five plates, a few hundred wells. She needs one number from it for a paper she is finishing. The file opens. The result is there. Then qbase+ crashes on save. She reboots. qbase+ won't restart.

She gets the number, eventually. But every one of those emails ends in the same question: how much longer will I be able to get to my old results? Will they survive the next Windows update?

After years of watching researchers use qbase+, I noticed that the science wasn't the fragile part.

The methods are well documented. The algorithms are validated. What's fragile is access over time: getting back to your own work three or five years later. The lab reorganises. Someone finishes their PhD. Three years later the data is still there, and getting to it has quietly gotten harder than it should be.

Some people put their qbase+ projects on shared drives or in Dropbox, which helps. But qbase+ was a single-user desktop application. Open the same project from two machines at once and you can end up with two divergent versions. And even alone, you still need a working qbase+ install on the machine you are sitting at to open it at all. The data travels. The application doesn't.

The data hasn't gone anywhere. The way back to it has just gotten harder, year by year.

The longer story of what happened to qbase+ (the Biogazelle acquisition by CellCarta, the deprecation, the silence on ResearchGate) is something Jan Hellemans has written about elsewhere. Short version: qbase+ stopped getting active development and was eventually deprecated. The methods stayed. The software went.

What I didn't fully appreciate, until those emails started arriving, was how many people still rely on data generated by qbase+. That data isn't lost. It's just stuck.

Stuck data starts costing you the moment you need it: a reviewer asks for a comparison, a thesis chapter needs a baseline, a collaborator wants the original Cq values from a paper you co-authored five years ago.

The data exists. The path to it doesn't.

You can now bring qbase+ data straight into Clarida. Drop your workspace in, and the experiments, runs, samples, reference genes, Cq values, plate layouts, and notes appear in Clarida, structured the way qbase+ saved them.

It is read-only. Different analysis settings produce different numbers. We don't impose ours on results you already published. What you bring across is what your experiments were when you last saved them.

If you want to try this, the path is below. It's free, and imported workspaces don't count against any quota.

Find your oldest qbase+ workspace. The one on the laptop you haven't booted in years. The one on the external drive in the drawer. The one on the server share whose password you would have to ask IT about.

You don't need qbase+ to open. Even old versions that no longer run (the ones that depended on an active license) left a workspace folder behind on disk. That folder is what Clarida brings across. As long as it exists, the data can come with you.

So: find it. Bring it across. Then tell us what worked and what didn't.

What does your oldest qbase+ workspace look like, and where is it sitting right now?