Questions about how google colab works

Part 1 (2018)
1

Hello everyone,

so in the last week, I have started using Google Colab and I am still not quite sure If I understand how the platform works.

So basically the first surprise was that if I download or install any library in one notebook it will spread to others. Which kinda surprised me but I thought “Ok that makes sense, that all your notebooks run on the same VM”. But there is still a lot of things that I don’t understand.

  1. When does the google colab drive resets? (when I run notebooks in the morning they are clean with no files on them)

  2. Today I ran a few notebooks that are all sharing the same files and libs, but now I created a completely new notebook and It doesn’t share the file env and also can’t connect to GPU.

I am sure there are people who have much more experience with googlecolab than I do so hopefully, you can help me.

Thanks :slight_smile:

2

Found my answer actually. The VM resets itself after 90 minutes of inactivity(no notebooks open)

You can also restart it by running kill -9 -1.