USB sync (file transfer) with Android

[Nathan Dorfman]

I have multiple Android devices and I've never succeeded in getting
MTP to work even halfway decently with Linux...

Most surprisingly, Gnome seems to handle MTP just fine out of the box.
However, this only works inside Gnome, so it's completely useless for
anything you can't do through the GUI. That said, if you just want to
take some directory and recursively copy it to the phone, as opposed
to, say, using rsync, then it should work okay.

go-mtpfs, mtpfs and jmtpfs on the other hand don't work with any of my
devices. Usually it will simply fail immediately. On my newer devices
-- an HTC One M8 and a Samsung T-320 -- it actually mounts
successfully and appears to work, until you try to copy anything more
than a single tiny file or two, at which point it crashes and
disconnects.

So, while I wish you the best of luck if you want to try it yourself,
I don't think you will get anywhere trying to use MTP -- it seems to
be completely broken.

The workaround I use is to set up an ssh server on my Ubuntu machine,
and use the AndFTP (which supports scp) to connect to it. The downside
is that you have to interface through the Android device rather than
through your desktop machine. On the other hand, no USB cable is
required, since it connects over Wifi :)

Another solution that may be available if you're using custom ROMs on
your Android devices is to re-enable the classic USB storage mode.
CyanogenMod allows this for instance. The downside is that this will
unmount the storage on the Android side -- you can't use it in both
places at once. On the other hand, it will work on any Linux system
just as easily as any plain old USB drive.

-nd.

On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 9:35 PM, thufir <hawat.thufir at gmail.com> wrote:
> What's a good approach to mounting and transferring files with Android?
> I'd like to physically connect the device with USB.
>
> I've seen:
>
> Android Debug Bridge
> http://developer.android.com/tools/help/adb.html
>
> mtp
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/376815/how-to-connect-mtp-android-device-
> to-ubuntu-13-10
>
> and reference to using MTP.
>
>
>
> thanks,
>
> Thufir
>
>
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