Igor Pro procedure run on online

If you have the ability to use 'Google drive for desktop', formerly 'Google filestream', then your drive will map as a physical drive and you can point Igor to that.

I have my user files folder this way in Igor so I may use several computers and be sure the code is the same everywhere/break everything everywhere all at once. Added benefit being Google will keep old versions of procedures archived to be restored if set to. 

This may only be an option if you have an corporate/organisational google account.

If you want to use/open/import any file from Google drive on your computer, you have to download it at least temporarily onto local drive. Google drive (and all other cloud drive tools) will download it to some temporary location (when needed) and make it available to you (Igor) from there. 

Note, that some of my users are having significant problems with files in Cloud drives.  I had users with whole home folders in cloud drives and/or experimental data shared through cloud drives... Some report procedure files not loading, data files not being read correctly/at all and even installation issues which I traced to Desktop content being not accessible to Igor while it showed correctly in Explorer. But, I believe that other users do not have issues. I have plenty of theories, main one is that file is in the cloud only and when Igor asks for it, Drive software will initiate download. But before the drive downloads it, Igor has moved on and problem happened. But I have no test setup to reproduce. I personally discourage users from using Igor with cloud drives to prevent this issue.  So my suggestion is, to download the file locally first and use from there. 

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. 

I understand what you meant. Anyways, this is what I am trying to do: suppose all the data files obtained from an experiment are stored in the google drive and now I want to analyze them from there without downloading them since I don't want to go through the downloading hassles (the data files are huge). If I download the google drive app on my laptop and install the app, Igor can see the google drive as an external hard drive and I can navigate to the folder and run Igor procedure and read files from there. But I noticed that the process is slow. 

Is there any efficient way to do that? 

Any suggestions will be highly appreciated. 

Ann

When Igor opens an experiment file, it loads all the data into memory. So if the data are in the cloud, all the bytes have to travel through the ether to get into your computer's memory, regardless of whether it is copied to temporary local storage or if it remains in the cloud and just the bytes travel. As fast as the internet is these days, hard drives are still faster. And solid-state drives are faster yet.