Do I miss here something? dtaa = read.table("http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/mplus/examples/ma_snijders/mlbook1.dat", sep=",") head(dtaa) # shows the data as it should be save(dtaa,"dtaa",file="c:/dtaa") d = load("c:/dtaa") head(d) # all data is lost, it only shows [1] "dtaa" "dtaa" Thanks for your hint on this. Toby