Syncing with PC/Mac via Rsync On Your Jolla
According to a tweet by Janne Peltonen, Sailfish has rsync pre-installed which if correct would make syncing files (photos/music/documents etc) via terminal between a PC or mac relatively straight forward.
#SailfishOS has rsync pre-installed! Getting pictures taken by a phone camera to my computer has never been this easy! Thanks @JollaHQ! <3
— Janne Peltonen (@PeltonenJanne) December 20, 2013
We’re not much of an expert when it comes to rsync, but after some brief searching online, found this article which seems to be a really good resource with 15 command examples on how to sync/backup: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/rsync-command-examples/
From the website. here are some examples of important features of rsync:
- Speed: First time, rsync replicates the whole content between the source and destination directories. Next time, rsync transfers only the changed blocks or bytes to the destination location, which makes the transfer really fast.
- Security: rsync allows encryption of data using ssh protocol during transfer.
- Less Bandwidth: rsync uses compression and decompression of data block by block at the sending and receiving end respectively. So the bandwidth used by rsync will be always less compared to other file transfer protocols.
- Privileges: No special privileges are required to install and execute rsync
For some example scenarios with command code, go and take a look at the site linked above.
This would make possible copying files either from/to your Jolla to/from your PC/mac without resorting to bluetooth or cables.
If you are a Linux/windows 7/8 user, there is already some USB connection possibilities with Jolla but for mac users currently the Jolla phone remains unrecognised via USB so this could indeed be a solution.
If this works for you, do let us know and share your experiences either here or our community port.
We’ll try and publish a tutorial once we have worked out the finer details.
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You may need to install additional software from the mer-tools repository,
http://releases.sailfishos.org/sdk/latest/mer-tools/builds/armv7hl/packages/
e.g.
dosfstools, emacs, git, htop, less, mtools, parted, powertop, rsync, ruby 1.9.3, strace, sudo, tcl/tk 8.5.12, zsh. nano
Although rsync is installed on my 1.0.1.12 (Laadunjarvi) (armv7hl). Will have to find some spare time to try it out:)
Richard
Brilliant I’ll give my old N900 sync script a go.
The Jolla works also nicely with sftp if you get no connection over USB like me on Linux.
Hopefully the issue with USB connectivity over anything other that M$ WIN 7 will be addressed as a matter of priority. As well as Linux there is OpenBSD, MINIX, Solaris, Apple etc.. etc
Richard
The fact the phone isn’t even recognised via USB on mac has almost convinced me not to bother with my 100€ preorder. It isn’t really a viable alternative for me given I expect (and use) the transparent sharing of info between mac laptops and my phone.
Yes! More command line tools to make things easy! Especially for Mac users…
What’s needed is something similar to the old Nokia OVI suite – though something that works all of the time, rather than when it felt like it. That needs to be available cross-platform ideally, for those that run Win, or OSX, as well as the Linux users. I found OVI great with my N900, less so with the N9 as MS, err I mean Stephen Elop, err for what ever reason, as the N9 never really worked well with any PC connectivity program that was any use. In fact I’d say that I had more contact/calendar corruption/duplication errors due to OVI with my N9 than anything else. So whatever the PC sync app does, it needs to work and be stable.
tried it without knowing. Sailfish is a very average-joe-linux-distro-like system so i thought it might have rsync installed as well. scp works for sure and it’s fast. rsaync also works, but is it fast? Not so, unfortunately. Transferring files gets me around 100kB/s which is really no good. In most cases you’ll be better off using scp instead despite the fact unlike rsync it will restransfer files that are already there.