How to download your raw DNA data from 23andMe
Most people who take a consumer DNA test look at the results in the company’s app and never realise there is a file underneath it. That file is yours, it is a plain text document, and it contains far more than the app shows you.
Here is how to get it.
Downloading the file
- Sign in to your 23andMe account on a desktop browser. The download is not available in the mobile app.
- Open the profile menu in the top right and choose Settings.
- Scroll to the bottom to 23andMe Data and select View.
- Find the Download Raw Data section and choose Submit request.
- You will be asked to confirm your password and answer a security question. This is a good sign — it is genetic data, and it should not be one click away.
- The file is prepared in the background. It usually arrives by email within an hour, occasionally up to 24 hours.
- The email contains a download link. It gives you a ZIP file of roughly 6–8 MB.
Keep the ZIP as it is. You do not need to unzip it to use it, and leaving it compressed makes it easier to move around.
What is actually in the file
Unzip it out of curiosity and you get a single text file with a few lines of header and then several hundred thousand rows that look like this:
# rsid chromosome position genotype
rs4477212 1 82154 AA
rs3094315 1 752566 AG
rs3131972 1 752721 GGFour columns, and they are worth understanding:
| Column | What it means |
|---|---|
rsid | The catalogue number for this position in the genome. rs3094315 refers to the same spot in every human being, so it is how research papers and databases refer to it. |
chromosome | Which of the 23 chromosome pairs it sits on. |
position | Where along that chromosome, counted in base pairs. |
genotype | The two letters you actually have at that position, one inherited from each parent. |
A -- in the genotype column means the reading failed for that marker. Every consumer file has some, and it is normal.
The thing most people get wrong about this file
A 23andMe file typically covers around 600,000 to 700,000 positions. That sounds enormous, and in one sense it is. But your genome has roughly 3.2 billion base pairs, so the file samples about 0.02% of it.
This is not a flaw. The positions were chosen because they are the ones that commonly vary between people and have been studied. But it has a consequence that matters:
Your file cannot tell you about a variant it does not contain a marker for. If a particular mutation is not one of the positions on the chip, the file has nothing to say about it — and that is not the same as the mutation being absent.
This is the single most important thing to understand before reading anything into your raw data. It is especially true for genes like BRCA1 and BRCA2, where consumer chips typically cover only a handful of the thousands of known variants. A file that shows nothing there is not an all-clear, and anyone with a family history that worries them should be talking to a clinician rather than reading a text file.
What you can do with it
The file is a standard format, and a lot of tools and services read it. You can:
- Upload it to genealogy services to find relatives in other databases.
- Run it through interpretation tools that read published research against your markers — including ours.
- Keep it. Storage is free and the research literature keeps growing, so the same file becomes more informative over time.
Look after it
One last thing. This file identifies you more precisely than your fingerprint, it is impossible to change, and it says things about your siblings, your parents and your children as well as you.
Store it somewhere you would be comfortable storing a passport scan. Think about who you send it to, and check what they say they will do with it — in particular whether they sell or share data, and whether you can actually get it deleted.
If you upload it here, it is encrypted with a key belonging to that file alone, we never sell or share it, and the deletion link in your email destroys the key permanently. That is the standard worth holding any service to, including this one.