Transfer files & keep dates. Secondary profile.

[deleted]

Any way to transfer files to PC with keeping date modified values from a secondary profile? I can only do this with ADB which cant be used in another profile.

[deleted]

[deleted] Any way to transfer files to PC with keeping date modified values

I have been exploring this sort of thing as part of a sync/backup/encrypted how-to. Sorry, I can't throw it together for you just now, nor elaborate further than this short reply. I seem to recall that using my Linux workstation, a naive copy of files from the GrapheneOS pixel using the linux file manager did not preserve the date / time, just as you point out.

However, I had this working some months ago in Linux using gmtp and I did make the following notes at the time. So I can say with certainty that gmtp is one option for you to preserve the date/time file attributes. You need the phone unlocked in the secondary profile you want to back up before connecting to the (Linux) PC.

using gmtp https://gmtp.sourceforge.io/usage.html use gmtp / right-click-camera/download-files will offer not to replace existing files already downloaded (so a one way sync which is nice) and there are options to keep the date/time attributes: settings/Preserve file timestamps: Enable this option to have downloaded files timestamps modified to match those as on the device.

You might need to do some hokey-pokey with gvfs-backends.

Also, I think Material Files will keep the date/time attributes when you copy to a fat32 USB stick. Someone here also once recommended the Amaze file manager and this might do the same if you use a USB stick as an intermediary solution.

[deleted]

[deleted] I'm now regretting not keeping better notes because I can't unpick other stuff I did subsequent to getting gmtp to work. What I can say is that I got gmtp working but then went off looking for a way to automate a two way sync, gos-pixel < > workstation so I could delete photos on the PC and sync the delete back to the phone and, as @[deleted] pointed out at the beginning of this thread, preserve file date/time attributes.

I must have used jmtpfs to get me most of the way because, just now, I found I had placed a device in Thunar named pixel-jmtpfs which mounts the GrapheneOS pixel in Thunar and allowed me to use Thunar to copy all the screenshots to a new folder on the PC and preserve date/time attributes. I had added entries in my /etc/fstab that set this up for me and I don't want to encourage people reading this to mess with their fstab; so let's just stick with getting gmtp working for now.

I do seem to recall now that one problem I had encountered with jmtpfs was that all profiles, on both pixels, came up with the same device identifier:

s@t490s:~$ jmtpfs -l Device 0 (VID=18d1 and PID=4ee1) is a Google Inc Nexus/Pixel (MTP). Available devices (busLocation, devNum, productId, vendorId, product, vendor): 4, 23, 0x4ee1, 0x18d1, Nexus/Pixel (MTP), Google Inc

This was too much of a hazard for me and risked accidentally syncing over the wrong device/profile (folks at home, this is why a SYNC is NOT a BACKUP). At that point I went back to gmtp as the easier temporary fix to backup photos ... and I'd not been back there since until your messsage caught my eye. I think I'm going to hide away from this again for another few months :)

[deleted]

A silly workaround is to pack the files in a tar archive and transfer that, but that is no good for regular usage.

[deleted]

[deleted] Wow thanks! Ill try this out!

[deleted]

[deleted] Yeahh, the best bit for me was:

will offer not to replace existing files already downloaded

So you get a one way sync for free with gmtp which was a super nice bonus.

I was also planning to use Unison / Unison-gtk which I use for everything else I do sync/backup wise on the computer. Unison can also preserve file attributes but I haven't pursued this further yet with a Phone/mtd device. I have plenty of notes to writeup about using this stuff with a GrapheneOS phone and an encrypted backup made to a USB stick with GrapheneOS and then syncing later to PC.

[deleted]

Interesting too that I discovered that copying files to a USB stick with AOSP/GrapheneOS Files app seemed to naively copy-replace all files. So, an attempted backup of all photos to a USB stick was also copy/replacing all the earlier photos too. I found no option to change this behaviour.

Material Files did give an option to not replace files - so this too was like a one way sync.

I messed around with RoundSync and other sync apps but it was messy and frustrating and things seemed designed to sync to the cloud rather than the USB stick. I found Material Files was just a quicker, easier, more power efficient way to do a trivial one way sync backup to USB of all camera photos.

The big disadvantage is that you need to select a folder and copy across rather than a proper sync app which ideally should allow one to just push a big sync button once things are configured. I still hope to get Unison to do this for me when the phone is connected to the workstation.

[deleted]

For some reason i cant connect my phone through mtp. Not even android-file-transfer, no mpt device found. But nautilus sees and can access the phone correctly.

[deleted]

[deleted] Linux distro + version ? I was using Debian Stable Bookworm back in February and today too.

First things first.

I last looked at this in February, so I just checked I have things working now before messing you around ... good news, things do work here, so we just need to get you there too.

Argghhh, can't add screenshots here. Only mechanism I have for you to see a couple of tiny screenshots is through my email/webdav/fileshare ; unfortunately that puts them up as a zip file, even if I do one pic at a time.

Here you are, 80kB in total so you should feel safe opening the zip up: https://user.fm/files/v2-436687651f8ee5bae192aa94aeb0232f/gosf.zip

First .png shows you that, when downloading the screenshot from the phone, gmtp has set the file's Modified attribute to the date/time the screenshot was taken on the phone.

Second .png is a screenshot of gmtp > right-click Screenshots > Download files and the option to Skip All overwriting existing files already backed up previously.

[deleted]

[deleted] For some reason i cant connect my phone through mtp. Not even android-file-transfer, no mpt device found. But nautilus sees and can access the phone correctly.

Ahh, I might have had this too. My notes from February say:

s@t490s:/mnt/isosphotos$ mtp-detect libmtp version: 1.1.20 Listing raw device(s) Device 0 (VID=18d1 and PID=4ee1) is a Google Inc Nexus/Pixel (MTP). Found 1 device(s): Google Inc: Nexus/Pixel (MTP) (18d1:4ee1) @ bus 4, dev 10 Attempting to connect device(s) libusb_claim_interface() reports device is busy, likely in use by GVFS or KDE MTP device handling alreadyLIBMTP PANIC: Unable to initialize device Unable to open raw device 0

Is Nautilus automounting the GOS Pixel?

Try running $ mtp-detect and see if you get similar message. Perhaps find a way to unmount phone and disable Nautilus from automounting it and let gmtp > Connect do the mounting.

[deleted]

These are the steps I took today to backup/oneway-sync the screenshots on my test/spare phone on both Primary/Owner and Secondary profiles - a GrapheneOS Pixel 5 build 2024030300. Sorry, just realised you will want to see this on latest GOS version ... but I just forgot & burnt the bread and will be divorced if I don't step away from the computer NOW ;)

On phone
Settings > USB Preferences > controlled by This device + Use for File transfer

on Debian Bookworm pc
GMTP in gui/gtk mode Connect button
navigate file tree
gmtp > right-click Screenshots > Download files and the option to Skip All overwriting existing files already backed up previously.

https://user.fm/files/v2-3b944fc5338266404586606ef5e29c96/gosf1.zip

[deleted]

You are about to see why I've not written this up yet. For now I'm just going to throw things over the wall at you. These are the notes I took at the time as I worked through getting this to work; but I use a very minimal collection of packages on my workstation and tend to add things until they work.

As a starting point: phone needs to be in MTP mode not PTP.

pixel5 mounted on t490s (using gvfs-backends): as MTP (= File transfer in GOS): gphoto2://Google_Pixel_5_/ but shows all folders for the profile as PTP: gphoto2://Google_Pixel_5_/ files are root and only shows Picture + DCIM folders

Package: android-sdk-platform-tools-common https://packages.debian.org/sid/android-sdk-platform-tools-common This package provides common files of Android SDK Platform-tools. It also provides UDEV rules enabling adb and fastboot to work without root access to the host machine.

$ lsusb -v 2> /dev/null | grep -e Bus -e iInterface -e bInterfaceProtocol Bus 004 Device 010: ID Google Inc. Nexus/Pixel Device (MTP) (Bus Powered) bInterfaceProtocol 1 Picture Transfer Protocol (PIMA 15470) iInterface 4 MTP

s@t490s:/mnt/isosphotos$ mtp-detect libmtp version: 1.1.20 Listing raw device(s) Device 0 (VID=18d1 and PID=4ee1) is a Google Inc Nexus/Pixel (MTP). Found 1 device(s): Google Inc: Nexus/Pixel (MTP) (18d1:4ee1) @ bus 4, dev 10 Attempting to connect device(s) Android device detected, assigning default bug flags USB low-level info: bcdUSB: 800 ... Device entry info: Vendor: Google Inc Vendor id: 0x18d1 Product: Nexus/Pixel (MTP) Vendor id: 0x4ee1 Device flags: 0x58008106 Configuration 0, interface 0, altsetting 0: Interface description contains the string "MTP" Device recognized as MTP, no further probing. Device info: Manufacturer: Google Model: Pixel 5 Device version: 1.0

s@t490s:~$ lsusb | grep Pixel Bus 004 Device 009: ID ... Google Inc. Nexus/Pixel Device (MTP)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Media_Transfer_Protocol

[deleted]

After going through this back in February, at some stage, gmtp just worked for me. I don't think I did anything sophisticated and I'm probably the least technically competent on this forum. I don't seem to have made any notes about configuring gmtp so here is a screenshot of the gmtp > preferences:

https://user.fm/files/v2-b9055102289e33cf7b67d32a1d4bd890/gosf2.zip

Perhaps there is some magic in https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Media_Transfer_Protocol but I think I went there later when I was experimenting with using gocryptfs (and 'fuse') to do encrypted sync backups.

[deleted]

Okay, it wasn't fair for me not to check this on the latest GOS version. Just checked now, and gmtp is doing what you want with my other GOS phone on build = 2024050700 also.

So, I think we can say GrapheneOS is not the issue and we need to get gmtp working on your PC.

(PS. bread turned out OK on the inside afterall :)

[deleted]

Turns out I do not have gvfs-backends installed. It looks like I manually picked dependencies from the dependency list in aptitude - probably just libmtp. Screenshot of the dependencies I have installed is here: https://user.fm/files/v2-06e33cc0e1310243371f4bb88ff85e9b/gosf3.zip

I have found the notes where I had encountered the root owning pixel files problem and then 'discovered' gmtp. There may be something here for you too:

2024-02-24 now have droidFS working on usb-c drive but not using storage scopes yet (but, see https://github.com/hardcore-sushi/DroidFS/issues/47) might have needed to decrypt a file into the usb-folder before permissions started working or, close and restart after first attempt was able to copy files into droidfs/gocryptfs folder on usb-c decrypt on laptop with gocryptfs/SiriKali but, several hours and still unable to get RCX/RoundSync to work

also, unison for pixel-pc sync need gos/usb/filetransfer=MTP or PTP => need gvfs-backends NOPE just choose <libmtp> AVOIDS apple+other junk - hmm maybe not, do a restart and see - NOT working in thunar

SO, problem with using gvfs-backends was principally that root owned the pixel files so, doubt unison will work nicely but, auto mounting did work, except multiple pixel/profiles had same device name (the serial number is unique in $mtp-detect BUT, android-file-transfer (qt) could see it, so just need unison to do the same THEN, found gmtp https://gmtp.sourceforge.io/usage.html - seems nicer than android-file-transfer BUT, android-file-transfer offers a cli option to $ aft-mtp-mount ~/mnt and will offer to ignore already 'downloaded'(to pc) files =equivalent to one way sync Preserve file timestamps: Enable this option to have downloaded files timestamps modified to match those as on the device.

[deleted]

s@t490s:~$ apt show jmtpfs Package: jmtpfs Version: 0.5-4 Priority: optional Section: utils Maintainer: Apollon Oikonomopoulos <apoikos@debian.org> Installed-Size: 133 kB Depends: libc6 (>= 2.34), libfuse2 (>= 2.8), libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0), libmagic1 (>= 5.12), libmtp9 (>= 1.1.0), libstdc++6 (>= 11), fuse Homepage: https://github.com/JasonFerrara/jmtpfs Download-Size: 41.9 kB APT-Manual-Installed: yes APT-Sources: http://mirror.ox.ac.uk/debian bookworm/main amd64 Packages Description: FUSE based filesystem for accessing MTP devices jmtpfs is a FUSE and libmtp-based filesystem for accessing MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) devices. It was specifically designed for exchanging files between Linux (and Mac OS X) systems and newer Android devices that support MTP but not USB Mass Storage. . The goal is to create a well-behaved filesystem, allowing tools like find and rsync to work as expected. To enable certain Android apps to detect and use the transferred files, MTP file types are set automatically based on file contents using libmagic.

[deleted]

The problem is, that when i click "Connect" it either says "unable to open raw device" or it will freeze. Which tells me, its doing something.

mtp-detect only works if i kill all gvfs related processes.

[deleted]

Is Arch/Ubuntu/Nautilus auto-mounting the GOS Pixel?

Perhaps try a sudo umount on the /media | /mnt location where gvfs has this mounted.

[deleted] mtp-detect only works if i kill all gvfs related processes.

Is it possible gvfs is your problem and is 'owning' the phone. What did mtp-detect say when you kill all gvfs related processes?

[deleted]

Im on Arch, but i also tried with ubutnu. Same problem sadly. Android file transfer and gmtp both freeze/crash when the phone is finally mtp detectable.

[deleted]

Okay, only jmtpfs works, but its ungodly slow. At least it preserves the dates well, so it works. But it will be unusuable if it takes hours to scan a single directory.

[deleted]

[deleted] Okay, only jmtpfs works, but its ungodly slow.

Might be fuse implementation slowing things down - or at least slow to scan the files; file transfer might be quicker.

Did the screenshot zips open for you? Were any of the gmtp preference settings different?

[deleted]

[deleted] As for automount, i disabled it in dconf.

[deleted]

[deleted] It says its OK. Works as intended, lists bunch of stuff.