Save a random Forest object

I'm not sure exactly what you're trying to do here, since normally you save an object and then load it later, like this:

set.seed(71)
> irisrf <- randomForest(Species ~ ., data=iris, importance=TRUE,
+                         proximity=TRUE)
> save(irisrf,file = "irisrf.RData")
> 
> rm(irisrf)
> print(irisrf)
Error in print(irisrf) : object 'irisrf' not found
> 
> load("irisrf.RData")
> print(irisrf)

Call:
 randomForest(formula = Species ~ ., data = iris, importance = TRUE,      proximity = TRUE) 
               Type of random forest: classification
                     Number of trees: 500
No. of variables tried at each split: 2

        OOB estimate of  error rate: 4.67%
Confusion matrix:
           setosa versicolor virginica class.error
setosa         50          0         0        0.00
versicolor      0         47         3        0.06
virginica       0          4        46        0.08

Here is a solution if you would like to load the model under another name

  library(randomForest)

  # 1. Create data set
  set.seed(100)
  df_iris <- randomForest(Species ~ ., data = iris, importance = TRUE,  proximity = TRUE)

  # 2. Save model
  file_name <- "model_iris.rds"
  saveRDS(df_iris, file_name)

  # 2.3. Load model under another name
  df_iris_loaded <- readRDS(file_name)
  df_iris_loaded

  # 2.4. Test two models
  identical(df_iris, df_iris_loaded, ignore.environment = TRUE)

I had the same problem (loading RandomForest object resulted in character string) and something like this seemed to have worked for me:

forest = get(load("forestGOOG.RData"))

(I have a random forest object 'forestGOOG' saved in the working directory)