Your Virtual Machine & Permanent Storage

In this course, we use Google Colab as our primary workbench. It is essential to understand that Colab provides a temporary virtual computer.

The Concept: Cloud Ephemerality

• Virtual Machine (VM): When you open a notebook, Google assigns you a computer in a data center. This computer has powerful CPUs and GPUs, but it is wiped clean the moment you close the tab or after a period of inactivity.
• Google Drive: This acts as your persistent "Hard Drive". To keep your work, datasets, and trained models safe, you must connect your Drive to the temporary VM.

Key Action: "Mounting"

Mounting is the technical term for making a storage device available to the operating system. Think of it like plugging a USB stick into the cloud computer. Once mounted, your Google Drive appears as a folder named /content/drive within the notebook's file system.

We will also create a dedicated folder COMP5511_2026 to keep our course materials organized.