rsync and a Nexus device

Nexus devices use media transfer protocol to transfer files to and from the device. There is no removable storage so you can’t take the card out and copy files from it via a card reader.

In the past I’ve used adb tools to push and pull to my device over USB debugging, however while we wait for nautilus gvfs support to be more reliable, this is what I do now (found online somewhere).

Unplug Nexus device.
sudo dnf -y install fuse fuse-libs libmtp simple-mtpfs
sudo wget http://christophersmart.com/files/99-nexus.rules \
-O /etc/udev/rules.d/99-nexus.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules

Plug in device and look for mtp device.
ls -l /dev/libmtp*
mkdir ~/nexus
simple-mtpfs ~/nexus && ls -l ~/nexus

Now rsync to your heart’s content
rsync -Pa ~/nexus/DCIM/ ~/Photos/nexus/

To unmount.
fusermount -u ~/nexus

2 thoughts on “rsync and a Nexus device

  1. It’s in development:
    https://github.com/philipl/gvfs

    Support may be in GNOME 3.8, but not anything earlier. There is also some basic support in KDE which works but isn’t super reliable. This has been the most reliable way I’ve found so far.

    Oh, and you can’t rsync with nautilus 🙂

    -c

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