# How to Fork Notebooks

Notebooks are a web-based Jupyter IDE with shared persistent storage for long-term development and inter-notebook collaboration, backed by accelerated compute.

You can collaborate with your team through Gradient notebooks. Notebooks are shared at the team level and use [shared persistent storage](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/notebooks/details/storage-architecture/index.html.md) at the team level. You can make notebooks public or private.

You can use forking to clone a public notebook into your workspace or to duplicate a notebook that is already in your workspace. Forking a notebook creates a new history for the notebook.

You can fork a notebook either from the Notebook dashboard using the hamburger menu or from the Gradient notebooks console using the **…** menu.

The files copied to the notebook are those listed in the notebook include file.

## Configure a Notebook for Forking

You can specify which files are available offline by providing a `.notebookinclude` file in the `/notebooks` [directory](https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/paperspace/notebooks/details/storage-architecture/index.html.md).

The file is similar to syntax found in a `.gitignore` file, however instead of ignoring your files, you include files. Negative patterns are supported.

The default `.notebookinclude` file looks like this:

```
*.md
*.ipynb

# and all of the files from `git ls-files`
```

For example, you can use gradient to upload all `.png` files to the storage provider while skipping dataset files:

```
*.png # include all png files
!datasets/**/*.png # exclude the ones in my datasets
```

Then, you can use a negative example to exclude `.md` files:

```
!*.md
```

## Operations References for `.notebookinclude` Files

| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| `#` | Comments out the line |
| `!` | Negates the pattern |
| `/` | Directory separator |
| `\*` | Wildcard |
| `?` | Wildcard exactly one character |
| `[a-zA-Z]` | Range notation to match a character in the range |
| `**/` | Match in all directories |
| `/**` | Match all files within a directory |
| `a\*\*/b` | Match zero or more directories between `a` and `b` |