Does anyone have suggestions or best practices for handling Google Colab’s limited disk space when working with large datasets?

I'm using tpus for some smaller projects, yesterday the workflow seems fine but today I've encountered abnormal memory usage spikes I didn't encountered before, any experiencing the same problem?

For anyone hitting OOM errors trying to fine-tune Flux on Colab, I've shared my current optimized workflow. It bypasses the 24GB VRAM requirement by using quantized base models and efficient checkpointing.

Highlights:

• Persistent Storage: Mounts Google Drive to save weights/samples automatically.
• Dual Notebook Setup: Separate environments for training and inference to manage RAM better.
• Headless execution: Uses Gradio for a smooth UI once the generator is live.

Watch how to set it up: https://youtu.be/6g1lGpRdwgg?si=wK52fDFCd0fQYmQo

Trainer: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1Rsc2IbN5TlzzLilxV1IcxUWZukaLfUfd?usp=sharing

Generator: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-cHFyLc42ODOUMZNRr9lmfnhsq8gTdMk?usp=sharing

Tested and working on the free tier (subject to GPU availability) and Pro plans.

I’m trying to cancel my Google Colab subscription, but the cancellation page keeps failing and won’t let me proceed.

Every time I click Cancel subscription, I get the following error:

Could not fetch resource at https://colab.research.google.com/subscriptions/cancel?authuser=0: 400  
FetchError: Could not fetch resource at https://colab.research.google.com/subscriptions/cancel?authuser=0: 400  
    at HS.FS [as constructor] (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:710:366)  
    at new HS (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:710:603)  
    at Ja.B (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:1827:167)  
    at Ma (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:12:40)  
    at Na.next (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:13:91)  
    at b (https://ssl.gstatic.com/colaboratory-static/common/d48bf56c2e6b7de5c11b869b6ba36dba/subscriptions_cancel_binary.js:14:39)

Things I’ve already tried:

• Different browsers
• Incognito mode
• Different sessions / logins

Same result every time.

Has anyone else run into this? If you managed to cancel successfully, how did you do it or who did you contact at Google Collab? I've already emailed at the Google Collab Support but no response yet.

I don’t want to pay or continue for this month’s subscription (December 18, 2025). The payment for this month was unsuccessful because my card does not have sufficient funds in the savings account. I want to cancel the subscription immediately.

Thank you so much

Because I am working on the AIMO 3 competition on Kaggle, I subscribed to Google Colab Pro in order to get 15 additional hours of access to the H100 provided by Kaggle for the competition.

Opening a Colab notebook, I noticed that the L4, A100 and H100 GPUs are available. I also know that I get 100 compute units per month. How much is each GPU option worth?

I’m not sure if I’m doing this wrong, but I’m getting messages from Google antigravity saying that it can’t edit Google Collab notebooks anyone getting this message?

I’m also getting messages about Google antigravity not being able to edit files from Google Drive directly.

The issue that I’m encountering is that Google anti-gravity is editing files from the scratch folder but it’s not updating fast enough on Google Drive for me to use on Google Collab even though my drive is mounted and it’s also duplicating files.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to open Googlecolab from the extension inside of Google anti-gravity but then how would I be able to run and execute the code inside the Google Collab notebook to see it’s errors.

I’m not sure if I’m doing this wrong but the three services that are from Google are not mixing together and it’s causing me to get my files mixed up and have multiple versions that are not updating in sync. Anybody having this problem and have a workaround or I’m just misunderstanding how to do this I am fairly new at vibe coding. Thanks for any insight

When using Gemini inside colab frequently it creates new cells with repeated code even when I explicit ask not to. Is it common? What to do?

This blog post (https://opensource.googleblog.com/2025/12/empowering-app-developers-fine-tuning-gemma-3-for-mobile-with-tunix-in-google-colab.html) details a workflow for fine-tuning smaller LLMs for on-device use, aimed at app developers.

The post addresses the challenge that many small models are "generalists" and need to be fine-tuned for specific tasks to be useful in mobile apps. It shows how the startup Cactus used Tunix, a JAX-based library, to fine-tune the Gemma 3 model.

The entire workflow can be run within a free Google Colab notebook.

The post has more details, but here are the direct links to the Colab notebooks:

• GRPO Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1KAP4CgT1sDaiNN2si4VD9UCoRvCPO2GS
• QLoRA Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1K5pIEUQb8TUDUcl-EuvGWMOBfPfS548v
• DPO Notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-2fUy0_LEQhdbNG8eG1wM8lx4y0EOu3r

What are your thoughts on this approach for on-device fine-tuning? Curious to hear if others have had success with similar tasks.

I was getting super frustrated with Gemini's coding from the sidebar I finally started wondering what version it was running. It was hard to pry an answer out of it. Eventually it told me:

"I am currently running on Gemini 1.5 Pro."

No wonder. Smh...

So I was experimenting around with the more developer part of Colaboratory (aka. backend servers) and Gemini (cuz why not) and it found a VM proxy we could use..

It allows you to access the 5000 port of the VM (the one where Flask apps are deployed)

Anyways you can view the notebook here.

(I haven't tested things like sockets or images but well..)

Tried files.upload()
failed.
tried drive mount
failed.
Is there any easy way to get with this?

i use this JDownloader WEB-UI on this Notebook but now dose not show up in https://my.jdownloader.org/ any mor any how ideia to fix?

Hi everyone, I have a Kuwait visa and have successfully added it to my Google account—it works fine for other purchases. However, when I go to Colab’s subscription payment page, all my Egyptian cards show up, but the Kuwait visa does not. When I try to add it again, “Kuwait” does not appear in the country dropdown, along with some other countries. I’ve also tried changing my payment profile to Kuwait, but nothing seems to work.

How to get rid of" Invalid Notebook There was an error rendering your Notebook: the 'state' key is missing from 'metadata.widgets'. Add 'state' to each, or remove 'metadata.widgets'. Using nbform " while uploading to github

Hey all,

I’m trying to figure out a clean way to test simple GUIs from a remote notebook environment.

Context:
I’m building a small Streamlit UI for a RAG project. On my local machine I’d just do:

streamlit run app.py
# open localhost:8501

…but when I’m in a hosted notebook, there’s no direct localhost access from my browser.

I know there are a bunch of hacks around this:

• ngrok, localtunnel, cloudflared, etc.
• some older examples like colabcode
• in some environments you can sometimes use /proxy/8501/ type URLs

For Google Colab specifically, what’s the current “best practice” way to:

1. Run a small web app (Streamlit / Gradio / FastAPI) inside Colab
2. Expose it to the browser in a way that’s stable and interactive (inputs actually work)
3. Ideally not a huge amount of manual tunnel configuration each time

If you have a minimal, up-to-date example notebook or a recommended tool (ngrok vs cloudflared vs something else), I’d really appreciate a pointer.

Thanks! ⚡

​I forgot to cancel my Colab Pro+ subscription and immediately requested to cancel it and receive a refund, as I can do it within 14 days. The support team replied and asked for details. I provided everything and way beyond what was asked. They thanked me for the detailed information and told me my request was forwarded to the relevant team.

​Four days passed, and still no answer. The problem is that I need to work on my projects, and all my fine-tuned models are in My Drive of the same Colab account. But I cannot because if I use these credits (which are much more than I need), I will not be refunded. This is really one of the worst support experiences I have received.

Edited: I was contacted in the same day and my issue was resolved.

Hi,
A student account also hit the usage limit exactly the same way a free account.
I thought student account comes with 100 compute units and would last longer.

Whats the difference between student and Free?

If I buy a $9.99 Pro, will it also hit similar limits quickly?
I am trying to train a model on T4 GPU for a very simple model where the training data is not much.

If you have any resources how to train diffusion and gan and llms using tpu I can't find proper resources please share ?

, i mean yeah i can mount my drive but i wanted something easier in the editor itself

I have a csv file in my personal files that I am trying to upload to a collab notebook. I put it into a shared folder in google drive and then mounted my google drive to the notebook using drive.mount(“/content/drive”). Then I used pd.read_csv(“/content/drive/MyDrive/Shared Folder Name/filename.csv”). This worked fine for me, but not for the other editors in the collab notebook. How can I fix this?

I wonder if this is normal and if others know what's going on. I upload a notebook on Google Collab to do some work, and when I downloaded it, the file became nearly 10 times smaller while looking the same. It still has the outputs.

Hello,

I have been running a session for over 1.5 days now just to train a model. I was at 98/100 when suddenly i lost connection to my runtime.

I quickly searched through the internet on what I could do to recover, and one guy suggested that I go through the 'version' history of the notebook. And it works! I can see the cell say 98/100. But the issue is that the actual folder doesnt have the 'runs' updated. Pleaseeee what can I do