I am going to explain 2 methods to upload large files to COLAB. And it is that there is a problem in Google Colab, or perhaps it is a restriction, that does not allow uploading files larger than 1Mb using its graphical interface.
It is very useful for those who are going to work with Whisper, since any audio weighs more than 1 MB
When uploading a file, it starts to load, it takes a long time and in the end the upload disappears or only 1Mb of our file is uploaded, leaving it incomplete.
I leave you a video
To solve this I will explain 2 methods:
- Importing files from Google Drive
- With the files library
As well I leave you a Colab with the code so you can see it and try it live
Import files to Colab from Google Drive
Another option to work with large files in Colab is to upload them to our Google Drive and sync Colab with Drive, so we can use whatever files we have there.
A very interesting option, especially when we have to use a Notebook on a recurring basis. We must remember that every time we run a notebook, all the information on the virtual hard disk is lost. Therefore having the notebook connected to Drive
IMPORTANT: That the email of the Colab account and the Google Drive account is the same, when I have tried to change it, using a Colab account and another Driva account, it has given me problems, although in theory it should work fine.
For this we will use the following code
from google.colab import drive
drive.mount('/content/drive')
Drive will ask us for permissions from the account
Once accepted we will see that it mounts the hard drive and we can now see the files
And later
They will be in a folder called drive or mydrive, in our case inside content as we have indicated
You can update the content in the left bar, with the folder icon.
How to upload files to Colab with files
Very simple, we will only add 2 cells with the following code, it could all be done in one cell but I like having the one that allows us to select our file in an individual cell.
So at the beginning of our Colab we will use
from google.colab import files
to import that python library
And then in the step that we want to upload our file we will put
files.upload()
This will go up to the root of the Colab.
If you know any other way, leave a comment.
