Google Colab – Use Without Saving Notebook to Drive

I tried to download my own files in bulk, and was successful. What I can think the problem is:

• The 96 files you tried to download amounted to a total file size of more than 2GB, which is the limit.
• An error might have occurred on Google's part as they try to compress your files. This can be quite common on such a busy site.
• Most likely it was temporarily, and you can now download files in bulk again.

What I can suggest is to split the whole batch into smaller groups (I recommend 10-15). This can reduce the amount of stress on Google servers and you can get all your files down like how you wanted it to be.

Like what OnenOnlyWalter pointed out, you can use Google Takeout if the 96 files are almost the whole collection that you have on Google Drive. It would be easier this way and you can delete what you don't need from your download.

I created a command-line tool to handle this.

After following the setup instructions on the GitHub project, you can run the tool with a specified path prefix and the email address of the new owner:

python transfer.py PATH-PREFIX NEW-OWNER-EMAIL

After getting authorization from OAuth, it will recursively walk the Google Drive account it got authorization to, match against the path prefix (ignoring non-matches), and then transfer ownership to the new email. If the new email address indicates a user who isn't even shared on the item yet, it will handle that as well. The current owner will not lose access, but the new or old owner can revoke it.

I should note that it's not always possible to transfer ownership of an item in Drive. For example, it's not possible to move ownership for an item from G Suite (Google Apps for Work) account to a normal GMail account. It can be shared (which the script will do), but ownership transfer will fail.