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is there anyone knows the lifetime of files on the colab virtual machine? for example, in a colab notebook, I save the data to a csv file as: 

data.to_csv('data.csv')

then how long will the data.csv exist?

This is the scenario: I want to maintain and update over 3000 small datasets everyday, but it seems that the interaction between colab and google drive by using pydrive is pretty slow(as I need to check every dataset everyday), so if the lifetime of files on the virtual machine is long enough, I can update the files on virtual machine everyday(which would be much faster) then synchronize them to google drive several days a time rather than everyday.

northcheng
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1 Answers1

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VMs are discarded after a period of inactivity, so your best bet is to save files to Drive that you'd like to keep as generated.

With pydrive, this is possible, but a bit cumbersome. An easier method is to use a FUSE interface to Drive so that you can automatically sync files as they are saved normally.

For an example, see: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1srw_HFWQ2SMgmWIawucXfusGzrj1_U0q

Bob Smith
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