

You can either clone an entire GitHub repository to your Colab environment or access individual files from their raw link. However, Colab provides various options to connect to almost any data source you can imagine.

Since a Colab notebook is hosted on Google’s cloud servers, there’s no direct access to files on your local drive (unlike a notebook hosted on your machine) or any other environment by default. How to upload files to and download files from Google Colab To browse the directory structure, you can use the file-explorer pane on the left. Since Colab lets you do everything which you can in a locally hosted Jupyter notebook, you can also use shell commands like ls, dir, pwd, cd, cat, echo, et cetera using line-magic (%) or bash (!).

Google Colaboratory is a free Jupyter notebook environment that runs on Google’s cloud servers, letting the user leverage backend hardware like GPUs and TPUs.
