title: Persisting data in Google Colaboratory
body: <p>Has anyone figured out a way to keep files persisted across sessions in Google's <a href="https://colab.research.google.com" rel="noreferrer">newly open sourced Colaboratory</a>?</p>
  <p>Using the sample notebooks, I'm successfully authenticating and transferring csv files from my Google Drive instance and have stashed them in /tmp, my ~, and ~/datalab. Pandas can read them just fine off of disk too. But once the session times out , it looks like the whole filesystem is wiped and a new VM is spun up, without downloaded files.</p>
  <p>I guess this isn't surprising given Google's <a href="https://research.google.com/colaboratory/faq.html" rel="noreferrer">Colaboratory Faq</a>:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>Q: Where is my code executed? What happens to my execution state if I close the browser window?</p>
  <p>A: Code is executed in a virtual machine dedicated to your account. Virtual machines are recycled when idle for a while, and have a maximum lifetime enforced by the system.</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Given that, maybe this is a feature (ie &quot;go use Google Cloud Storage, which works fine in Colaboratory&quot;)? When I first used the tool, I <em>was</em> hoping that any .csv files that were in the <strong>My File/Colab Notebooks</strong> Google Drive folder would be also loaded onto the VM instance that the notebook was running on :/</p>