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Mass Storage

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 21:55 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
In reply to: Negatives by jmorris42
Parent article: The Nexus 7: Google ships a tablet

As far as Google is concerned, USB Mass Storage on Android is dead and buried. The last Nexus to have it was the Nexus 1; neither the Nexus S nor the Galaxy Nexus had it. It's useless to complain about it now.

The reason is that USB Mass Storage requires Android to unmount that storage, which plays havoc with apps trying to use that storage.

While MTP isn't a great solution (especially for Linux), QuickSSHd works for me, and adb is also an option.


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Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:08 UTC (Tue) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

> While MTP isn't a great solution (especially for Linux)...

I've noticed this as well, and I'm surprised its still a problem after this long. MTP may be a proprietary protocol, and difficult to support in general, but the code to support it on the device side in Android is presumably open-source. Couldn't that be used to implement a perfectly compatible FUSE/GVFS MTP interface specifically for Android devices?

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:24 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

I found these FUSE solutions, but haven't tried them:
http://code.google.com/p/mtpfs/
https://launchpad.net/mtp-fuse/

gvfs-gphoto2 may work, but I mostly found complaints about it not working.

Most of the MTP work in Linux-land seems to have been to support old MP3 players.

If I could just get rsync to work in computer-initiated mode I'd be happy, but for now I use "rsync backup for Android" to copy certain directories over to the computer.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 7, 2012 22:45 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I had tried both and they treated extensions as the rule and would refuse to upload a tarball since it couldn't figure out where to put it. I'm also pretty picky about my music layout and I couldn't see a way to upload a directory structure, just files which presumably get "auto sorted" (poorly). That was when it didn't time out or crash of course.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 8, 2012 0:38 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

I just ran across this project, which looks promising:

https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs

It put the (mp3/flac) files where I told it to, rather than sorting them into random subdirectories according to its own scheme, and the performance was reasonable. However, it may be a bit unstable yet; it seemed to lock up at one point while I was scanning through the camera folder with Gwenview, requiring a USB reconnect.

MTP

Posted Aug 13, 2012 9:19 UTC (Mon) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

If it’s any help, I put together mtpy, which is a high-level Pythonic wrapper around libmtp. mtpull is a simple example script using mtpy that I use for pulling photos off my Galaxy Nexus.

Mass Storage

Posted Aug 24, 2012 11:15 UTC (Fri) by tekNico (guest, #22) [Link]

"neither the Nexus S nor the Galaxy Nexus had USB Mass Storage" My Nexus S does have it.

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