How to Save Files from Google Colab to Google Drive A StepbyStep Guide

As a software engineer, I often find myself working with Google Colab for various machine learning projects. While Colab is a fantastic platform for collaborative coding and data analysis, it can be confusing when it comes to saving files and accessing them later. In this blog post, I will provide a step-by-step guide on how to save files from Google Colab to Google Drive.

Why Save Files to Google Drive?

Before diving into the steps, let’s first understand why it is essential to save files to Google Drive when working with Google Colab.

Google Colab is a cloud-based platform that offers free access to a Jupyter notebook environment, which allows users to write and execute Python code. While Colab provides an option to save notebooks to Google Drive, it does not automatically save files that are generated during the execution of code.

For example, suppose you are running a machine learning model on Colab. In that case, the model will generate various files such as weights, biases, and other artifacts. If you do not save these files to Google Drive, you will lose them when you close the Colab session.

Therefore, to avoid losing data and files generated during the Colab session, it is crucial to save them to Google Drive.

Step-by-Step Guide to Save Files to Google Drive

Now that we understand the importance of saving files to Google Drive let’s dive into the steps to save files from Google Colab to Google Drive.

Step 1: Mount Google Drive

The first step is to mount Google Drive on Google Colab. To do this, you need to run the following code snippet:

from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

The above code will prompt you to authorize access to your Google Drive account and generate an authentication code. Once you enter the code, your Google Drive will be mounted, and you can access it from Colab.

Step 2: Create a Folder for Your Files

The next step is to create a folder in Google Drive where you want to save your files. You can create a folder manually on Google Drive or run the following code to create a new folder:

import os
from google.colab import drive

# Mount Google Drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

# Create a folder in the root directory
!mkdir -p "/content/drive/My Drive/My Folder"

The above code will create a new folder called “My Folder” in the root directory of your Google Drive.

Step 3: Save Files to Google Drive

Once you have mounted Google Drive and created a folder, you can save files generated during the Colab session to Google Drive. To save a file, you need to use the file I/O functions provided by Python.

For example, to save a file called “sample.txt” to the “My Folder” directory, you can use the following code:

import os

# Mount Google Drive
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')

# Create a folder in the root directory
!mkdir -p "/content/drive/My Drive/My Folder"

# Write a sample file to Google Drive
with open('/content/drive/My Drive/My Folder/sample.txt', 'w') as f:
  f.write('Hello, World!')

The above code will create a file called “sample.txt” in the “My Folder” directory and write “Hello, World!” to the file.

Conclusion

Saving files from Google Colab to Google Drive is essential to avoid losing data and files generated during the Colab session. In this blog post, we provided a step-by-step guide to save files to Google Drive.

Remember, before saving files to Google Drive, you need to mount Google Drive on Colab and create a folder where you want to save your files. Once you have done that, you can use the file I/O functions provided by Python to save files to Google Drive.

I hope this guide helps you save files to Google Drive easily. Happy coding!

SHARE:

About Saturn Cloud

Saturn Cloud is your all-in-one solution for data science & ML development, deployment, and data pipelines in the cloud. Spin up a notebook with 4TB of RAM, add a GPU, connect to a distributed cluster of workers, and more. Request a demo today to learn more.