I have a dataframe df. Now, I took a backup of this df using:
df_backup = df
Later on in my code, I deleted few records from the original df using:
df.drop(df.index[indexes], inplace = True)
these rows gets deleted from the backup as well.
It looks like df_backup is just a copy of df. How do I decouple both?
If I change anything to df, it shouldn't affect df_backup.
you can decouple them by making an actual copy (a copy is a separate object)
df_backup = df.copy()
as Anthony Sottile pointed out, you were creating another reference to your original dataframe rather than creating a new object. Which means you could change either your df or df_backup and both would show that change. He also suggested a good link to help understand this
df_backup = df does not create a copy (since python is a referential language) and just makes two references pointing to the same object. OP seems confused about this :) perhaps stackoverflow.com/questions/986006/… might clear some stuff up too