Google Colab: how to read data from my google drive?

Question

The problem is simple: I have some data on gDrive, for example at /projects/my_project/my_data*.

Also I have a simple notebook in gColab.

So, I would like to do something like:

for file in glob.glob("/projects/my_project/my_data*"):
    do_something(file)

Unfortunately, all examples (like this - https://colab.research.google.com/notebook#fileId=/v2/external/notebooks/io.ipynb, for example) suggests to only mainly load all necessary data to notebook.

But, if I have a lot of pieces of data, it can be quite complicated. Is there any opportunities to solve this issue?

Thanks for help!

Answer 1

Edit: As of February, 2020, there's now a first-class UI for automatically mounting Drive.

First, open the file browser on the left hand side. It will show a 'Mount Drive' button. Once clicked, you'll see a permissions prompt to mount Drive, and afterwards your Drive files will be present with no setup when you return to the notebook. The completed flow looks like so:

The original answer follows, below. (This will also still work for shared notebooks.)

You can mount your Google Drive files by running the following code snippet:

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

Then, you can interact with your Drive files in the file browser side panel or using command-line utilities.

Here's an example notebook