Google colab and google drive: Copy file from colab to Google Drive - google-drive-api

Question

There seem to be lots of ways to access a file on Google Drive from Colab but no simple way to save a file from Google Colab back to Google Drive.
For example, to access a Google Drive file from Colab, you can mount the Google Drive using
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
However, to save an output file you've generated in Colab on Google Drive the methods seem very complicated as in:
Upload File From Colab to Google Drive Folder
Once Google Drive is mounted, you can even view the drive files in the Table of Contents from Colab. Is there no simple way to save or copy a file created in Colab and visible in the Colab directory back to Google Drive?
Note: I don't want to save it to a local machine using something like
from google.colab import files
files.download('example.txt')
as the file is very large

Answer 1

After you have mounted the drive, you can just copy it there.
# mount it
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
# copy it there
!cp example.txt /content/drive/MyDrive

Answer 2

Other answers suggest how to copy a specific file, I would like to mention you can also copy the entire directory, which is useful when copying logs from callbacks from Colab to Drive:
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
In my case, the folder names were:
%cp -av "/content/logs/scalars/20201228-215414" "/content/drive/MyDrive/Colab Notebooks/logs/scalars/manual_add"

Answer 3

You can use shutil to copy/move files between colab and google drive
import shutil
shutil.copy("/content/file.doc", "/content/gdrive/file.doc")

Answer 4

When you are saving files, simply specify the Google Drive path for saving the file.
When using large files, Colab sometimes syncs the VM and Drive asynchronously. To force the sync, simply run:
from google.colab import drive
drive.flush_and_unmount()

Answer 5

in my case I use the common approach with the !cp command.
But sometimes, it didn't work in Colab because we didn't enter the right file path.
basic code: !cp source_filepath destination_filepath
implementation code:
!cp /content/myfolder/myitem.txt /content/gdrive/MyDrive/mydrivefolder/
in addition, to correctly enter the path, you can copy the path location from the table of contents on the left side by clicking the dot menu -> copy path.

Answer 6

Once you see the file in the Table of Contents of Colab on the left, simply drag that file into the "/content/drive/My Drive/" directory located on the same panel. Once the file is inside your "My Drive", you will be able to see it inside your Google Drive.

Answer 7

After you mount your drive...
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
...just prepend the full path, including the mounted path (/content/drive) to the file you want to write.
someList = []
with open('/content/drive/My Drive/data/file.txt', 'w', encoding='utf8') as output:
for line in someList:
output.write(line + '\n')
In this case we save it in a folder called data located in the root of your Google Drive.

Answer 8

You may often run into quota limits using the gdown library.
Access denied with the following error:
Too many users have viewed or downloaded this file recently. Please
try accessing the file again later. If the file you are trying to
access is particularly large or is shared with many people, it may
take up to 24 hours to be able to view or download the file. If you
still can't access a file after 24 hours, contact your domain
administrator.
You may still be able to access the file from the browser:
https://drive.google.com/uc?id=FILE_ID
No doubt gdown is faster but i copy my files using the command below and avoid quota limits
!cp /content/drive/MyDrive/Dataset/test1.zip /content/dataset