Is text the only content type for %%storage magic function in datalab
<p>I am working with he new cloud datalab and trying to save binary files to a GCS bucket using the magic function %%storage. For instance, I like to save PANDAS data frames (used to do it as pickle files) and mostly SciKitLearn model objects (after training).</p>

<p>I have tried a few things with %%storage and no luck. It seems to me that %%storage is intended to work with text data only. Is this a correct? I have no issues with CSV files for instance. The parameters that I can provide for <code>%%storage write</code> are only the bucket object and the variable to be saved.</p>

<p>I know that the notebooks included in datalab are intended to be the datalab documentation. But with all fairness, that documentation is extremely poor, to put it in polite terms. Also, the embedded documentation on the code (pressing shift+tab) when cursor is on the code within a cell, it is also very very poor.</p>

<p>If any of you had any other source of documentation for this, please let me know. I tried perusing the git hub code but could not get to it.</p>

<p>In my view, adding magic function functionality is supposed to make things easier for ad-hoc data analysis and such using notebooks. Though, by having this poor implementation and poor documentation, it defeats the purpose and making it more cumbersome. Actually, if you are new on this, a good advice will be to go directly and learn the gcloud API for python and do not bother with datalab magic functions and datalab API given the level of maturity.</p>