Uploading to Google Drive directly from a URL

 1. Open Google Colab and click “New notebook”.
 2. Open the files tab in the sidebar and mount google drive.

 3. Paste the following code into a cell and run it (Ctrl+Enter).

!wget -P /content/drive/My\ Drive/upload_folder http://www.url.to/your/file.txt

replacing upload_folder with an existing directory on your google drive (into which the file will be uploaded) and http://www.url.to/your/file.txt with your files’s url.

I’ve found this method to be much faster than downloading the file onto my machine and then uploading it to google drive.