Instructions for using Colab to Download Files to Google Drive

What is Google Colab?

Googel Colab is a free service that helps you compile Python using GPUs from Google. Colab is applied AI programming, Machine learning when algorithms need GPU power to compile. For example, to Download File to Google Drive with Colab using Google’s GPU power, it only takes 5 seconds to download a 3Gb file.

You can see an example How to Download Skillshare Premium Course with Colab very fast and convenient.

Currently, programmers often choose Colab instead of AWS’s high-cost service. Colab supports GPU (Tesla K80) and TPU (TPUv2). How to use Colab is similar to that on Jupiter Notebook. This is a great free service from Google if you don’t have a highly configurable computer to program and compile Python with deep learning libraries. Currently, Google Colab has available popular libraries to support research on artificial intelligence such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras and OpenCV.

How to use Colab to Download Files to Google Drive

This article will be a simple example of using Colab to connect to Google Drive. You will use the Python command to Download the File to Google Drive without downloading it to your computer.

This will save you a lot of time if you want to leech files from elsewhere to Google Drive for storage.

Let’s practice with Colab too!

GPU Setup for Colab

First, let’s login to Google Colab and sign in with your Google account.

To take advantage of the GPU to process Code faster, go to Menu Runtime -> Change runtime type

Select Hardware accelerator to be GPU

In the Connected right corner select Connect to hosted rutime

Code to connect Colab with Google Drive

Now we will code to connect Colab with Drive.

Next, you click on the line + Codethen below will appear the box to enter your Code, Copy the code below:

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

Then press Ctrl + Enter or click the button Play

This code will help you connect Colab with your Google Drive. If successful, you will see the link to get the Google Drive Link Key

Select the account that grants the linking permission, then select Allow to get the Key

This is the key for you to authenticate Drive with Colab

Copy the Key and go back to the Colab page and paste it in the box Enter your authorization codethen press Enter:

If successful you will see the message:

Code Download File to Google Drive

So you have finished connecting Colab with Google Drive. The next step we will create a Code input box to Download File to Google Drive.

Click the button + Code to create the 2nd Code input box

Copy the code below:

import requests
file_url = "https://cdimage.kali.org/kali-2020.1/kali-linux-2020.1a-installer-amd64.iso"
r = requests.get(file_url, stream = True)
with open("/content/gdrive/My Drive/kali-linux-2020.1a-installer-amd64.iso","wb") as file:
  for block in r.iter_content(chunk_size = 1024):
    if block:
      file.write(block)