Database Users

Wirelessly Transfer Files to and from Xoom using FTP (look mom no cables)

Hello Everyone,
This isn't anything ground breaking but it might be something that someone has not thought about doing to their Xoom yet. You can easily turn your Xoom into an FTP Server through a free application. And then get an FTP client for your computer. Then use your computer to upload and download files onto your Xoom over the local Wifi or Internet. File transfer between devices is really fast and works very well. I have a video tutorial running through the basics on getting this working both on your Computer and on your Xoom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hy_wnSKN_CM

What makes this more or less desire able than say dropbox?

cwizardtx said:
What makes this more or less desire able than say dropbox?
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Click to collapse
Dropbox is cloud based. Your information is saved on a remote server where any device that supports Dropbox can download from it. So you have to upload it to the cloud from your computer, then download the files to your xoom.
This type of direct FTP transfer is similar to a USB transfer. There is no intermediate storage space, like a dropbox, you are directly transferring files from your Xoom to your computer or vice versa.
I personally use both. They have different functionality. If I want to quickly transfer a file to my android device, I use FTP. If I want to store a file so I can grab it later from any of my devices, I use cloud.

grab an app from the market called Websharing.
It allows you to transfer files, wirelessly, from an android device/to a computer and vice versa, all through a web browser..
very handy for transferring stuff without a wire...

FYI, all of the decent file explorers for android have this feature built in. No need to download another app.

mobius999 said:
FYI, all of the decent file explorers for android have this feature built in. No need to download another app.
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Agreed. I was more or less throwing the idea out there. But there are many options and applications both for the Server and Client.

What I like about this option is that it uses such an age-old-tried-and-true method of moving files.
Nothing weird, ****ed up, magical about it like USB on Linux that dosn't want to work 90% of the time

please try wifi explorer available in the market.

I use SwiFTP server on my Xoom & DroidX. The I just FTP files to and from my devices with Filezilla. There might be better ways but this works just fine for me.

With as fast as the USB data is on the xoom (like a movie a minute, if not faster) i dont see why you would want to do this if your already at your computer. If your out and about then yeah, that's cool.

I've done the same on my Nexus One for ages.
The idea is that this effectively gives you ability to push files onto the device wirelessly without having to go and find it. And you don't actually need an FTP client - in Windows, at least, Explorer (not IE, but the stock file manager) can perfectly well handle ftp://... if you type it in the address bar. If you also assign a name to your phone on the router, you can use that instead of IP, so you don't have to look it up on the phone.
Also note that we're talking about running an FTP server on the phone (exposing /sdcard), not connecting to other servers out there. "All of the decent file explorers for android" are FTP clients, which is quite different.

Yea, there's multiple ways to go about this. I just use an app called Samba Filesharing from the market. It just makes your internal storage visible on the network as an SMB share. Works really well. I've also started to use AndSMB to browse my home FreeNAS server as well so that's another option I suppose.

I actually prefer awesome drop or dropbox(when it is working right) but nice thinking outside of the box

I can highly recommend "File Expert",
for me it's the ultimate app/toolkit - all in one
just uploaded 2 GB of music files to my Xoom via that "Sharing" -> "Start Share via FTP" function

[Q] Any idea on how to transfer files from PC to A500 without SD or Root?

Any idea on how to transfer files from PC to A500 without SD or Root? Thanks!

Why not use the included mini-USB cable?
Another option would be some kind of file manager. I use ES File Explorer. I can navigate over LAN to my laptop / desktop and grab files.
Dropbox is another option. Though you'd first have to send the files to your DB folder on your PC - this does have the added benefit of being able to get to those files anywhere you have a WiFi connection though.

File expert is nice. Plus it can stream media from your PC.
__________________________________________________ ______________________
ZTE Blade - Rooted OC 729mh - CM7 RC2 V/nice
Advent Vega - Rooted OC 1.4gh - Corvous5 rom gorgeous smoooth and qqquick
Iconia A500 - Rooted - HComb Sweet

ftp would also work I would think.

Dropbox
How about dropbox, then it's pretty much automatic after you save the file on the PC.

thisisnitwit said:
Any idea on how to transfer files from PC to A500 without SD or Root? Thanks!
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PogoPlug also works very well (free in Market), AND the premium app allows to stream audio/video to any mobile device from your PC.

USB USB USB!
USB cable to PC shows in the Windows Explorer.
USB Thumb/Flash Drive
USB Harddrive

+1 for dropbox... works awesome!

One thing I noticed is that some of the folders that appear on Root Explorer do not appear on my computer like the beautiful widgets folder.

gammaRascal said:
Why not use the included mini-USB cable?
Another option would be some kind of file manager. I use ES File Explorer. I can navigate over LAN to my laptop / desktop and grab files.
Dropbox is another option. Though you'd first have to send the files to your DB folder on your PC - this does have the added benefit of being able to get to those files anywhere you have a WiFi connection though.
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I use Tonido on my file server with the Tonido client on my A500.
http://tonido.com/
Works really well for this.

robnix said:
I use Tonido on my file server with the Tonido client on my A500.
http://tonido.com/
Works really well for this.
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That actually looks a very ellegant solution - maybe even a little enterprise'ee if you dont mind the term. As a user, how is it working for you when you compare to the other options?

robnix said:
I use Tonido on my file server with the Tonido client on my A500.
http://tonido.com/
Works really well for this.
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Click to collapse
Acer USB drivers, USB debugging on
Plug in USB to Win 7 64-BIT PC
Device seen as portable media player
Copy and paste to Device

gammaRascal said:
That actually looks a very ellegant solution - maybe even a little enterprise'ee if you dont mind the term. As a user, how dy fing working for you when you compare to the other options?
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Click to collapse
+1 for tonido. Works great

I don't get it... I must be missing something here.
I simply plug my stock unrooted Acer into my pc via usb port and copy over files.

gammaRascal said:
That actually looks a very ellegant solution - maybe even a little enterprise'ee if you dont mind the term. As a user, how is it working for you when you compare to the other options?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
vs. USB:
downloading files is much faster over wifi than USB, and there's no performance hit like there is with USB.
I can access my files from anywhere I have a data connection. it was nice the other day to think about an album i wanted to hear and download it over my work wifi
vs. Dropbox
no special folders to setup, you just browse the file structure on your server.
The only real issues I have with it so far are:
I can't set a default download folder on my A500. I'm hoping they fix this.
You have to kill the client to move files from the default download folder to say your external sd card.

Whats the best way of obtaining the files if you have external hard drive on a network? I've been told of several file folder managers, but have been unsuccessful in getting into my network.

You can accomplish this with tonido as long as your external USB drive is mapped to your pc.

robnix said:
vs. USB:
downloading files is much faster over wifi than USB, and there's no performance hit like there is with USB.
I can access my files from anywhere I have a data connection. it was nice the other day to think about an album i wanted to hear and download it over my work wifi
vs. Dropbox
no special folders to setup, you just browse the file structure on your server.
The only real issues I have with it so far are:
I can't set a default download folder on my A500. I'm hoping they fix this.
You have to kill the client to move files from the default download folder to say your external sd card.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Re. Dropbox
I agree, a way to change the default folder/location to an external SD card would be nice.
Also, a way to set a global 'hard download' option for all or a folder would be nice vs. the individual file(s).
For some of us without a full time 3G/Wifi connection I prefer to have my files synced and resident on the device.

Nobody using Acer sync? The client is already pre-installed on the Iconia, you just have to install Acer sync on your PC. Sync by wifi or USB on demand. Pretty easy to use. I also use remote web desktop app with nice drag and drop feature, websharing by NextApp and wifi explorer which give you more control on which folder to transfer files.
Sent from my A500 using Tapatalk

i'm still trying to figure out how to move music files around. I connect my tablet to my computer via usb cable. I put some music into the acer music folder and then look for it with the google music app and nothing comes up. But everytime I look at the music folder on the a500 using my computer the albums and songs show up. I can find the music on my computer with the clear fi app but when i click on a song to listen to it clear fi says it dosent support the file. Every thing I have has been downloaded to windows media player.

[Q] USB file transfer speeds!??

Hi,
Has anyone else noticed very slow USB file transfer speeds (like USB 1.0 ?) in Windows 7?
I have been copying movies and TV episodes to watch on the KF and was wondering if I broke anything by rooting etc... or if this speed was to be expected (seems ridicilous for modern hardware).
If this is a USB driver issue is there a workaround i.e. installing a different driver for the device in device manager?
Or alternatively an easy and FAST way to transfer files between the KF and Windows 7?
Thanks

This is a well known issue.
See here for the details: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amazon-kindle-fire-review,3076-11.html
Possibly can be fixed in a future update/mod as it's not a fundamental hardware bottleneck.
Anyway it's actually much faster to transfer via wifi! I use Dropbox to get files onto my Fire (it's an easy side load that be downloaded direct from the Dropbox website onto the Fire).

Do you know of any wifi file explorer options, i.e., use wifi to see folders on another computer for download?
Thanks.

esoh said:
Do you know of any wifi file explorer options, i.e., use wifi to see folders on another computer for download?
Thanks.
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Click to collapse
I use cifsManager. It's available on the Android Market. But first you need the cifs kernel module. You can get it at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1396960
And, here's a nice little tutorial on how to get this done: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1397461

esoh said:
Do you know of any wifi file explorer options, i.e., use wifi to see folders on another computer for download?
Thanks.
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Click to collapse
I can see my network shares over wifi with Astro and with File Expert, both file explorers.
Dropbox is pretty handy too!

If you want to do it from the Kindle, you can point ES File Explorer (free) to your share. Use the LAN tab.

right - best choice - i use es file exlorer to stream from other devices (computer,nas,...)
with file expert you can activate a built in ftp or http server and you can stream from your kindle - really easy !

How do you transfer files and what are your speeds?

This is my first android thingy that doesnt have an SD card slot or use UMS. So I'm exploring my options for transferring files back and forth from my computer to my nexus7. All my computers are using kubuntu 12.04. So far, I have tried a few things and it seems like there would be an easier way and faster speeds than what I'm getting. Hopefully some of you that have had this tablet longer than myself have come up with something better than what I found. Ideally, it would be a plug-n-play solution, without needing root access on the computer to setup. Here's what I tried so far -
adding the kio-mtd slave for kde
This was the easiest one to setup. I found a .deb for this already built, and installed it. Right out of the box, it works. The nexus appears as a mtp device and i can access it via dolphin (the stock kde browser). What I didn't like about this is that it seemed slow and unresponsive. Copying a file to or even creating a folder on the phone took a while - much longer than it should. This needs root access to install the .deb.
using NFS
Nfs worked, but it is a whole lot of stuff to setup compared to just plugging in a USB cable. I wouldn't be able to use this if I took my nexus to somebody's house and wanted to grab a file from their computer. It would take anywhere from 20 minutes to hours to setup the nfs server, depending on who was setting it up. The speeds I got were about 1/2 as fast as using adb to transfer the files; it took 6 minutes to copy a 650MiB file to the tablet. However, nfs does allow random access, so if I needed to open a file, seek to the middle of it, and read a small bit, I could do that without having to copy the whole thing.
using adb
ADB so far has been the fastest method I've used to transfer files. The same 650MiB file that took 6 minutes on nfs took 3 minutes with "adb push". I found several fuse and gui wrappers around adb. All of those wrappers expected busybox to be in $PATH on the tablet, so it would need to be rooteted. I didn't find any "just plug it in and it will work" solutions. The big con with adb is that you have to setup the udev rules or else run adb as root. It seems like you should be able to transfer files without needing root access on the computer.
ftp
This wasnt much different than nfs. You need to have a client/server running on the tablet, and one running on the computer. The speeds were about the same as with nfs; 4 minutes for my same 650MiB file. Ftp still isnt as plug-n-play as I'd like.
So what have you guys tried and how well did it work out?

I'm also using KDE, but I'm on Arch Linux.
I've tried the MTP KIO slave, but that didn't work for me.
I've also tried MTPFS, JMTPFS and a other MTP solutions. They work, but are sometimes not responding immediately and are slower than I would wish. But I haven't done a speed test.
Of course I've tried ADB. It works, but is also too slow for my taste. Especially when used over wifi.
FTP server was the easiest method to set up on my N7 with ES File Explorer. But it also isn't really fast.
Next I will try SAMBA since I haven't found an easy solution for a NFS server on Android.
But on my i9100 with CM10 even UMS (emulation of a USB drive) is slower than putting in the SD directly into my laptop.
So I'm still searching for a fast and easy way to share files between my Android devices, my Laptop and my Raspberry Pi.
My dream would be a fast and easy way to keep a directory on my laptop synchronized with my Android devices like dropbox does it on desktop devices (minus the slow cloud).

NST is it possible to use a phone/tablet to sideload books?

Hi,
Is it possible to use a phone or tablet as GUI to manage a NST to load, delete, organize the library?
I think not but thought I could ask, who knows?

d8v8n8 said:
Hi,
Is it possible to use a phone or tablet as GUI to manage a NST to load, delete, organize the library?
I think not but thought I could ask, who knows?
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I have used an app called WiFi File Transfer. It works through a browser page, allowing you to manipulate both folders and files. The free version is limited to 5 MB max. for a file, not typically a problem with e-books. On my Nook Tablet screen it is doable. I can always zoom in. On a little phone it would be difficult I think.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smarterdroid.wififiletransfer
Edit: I thought of another possibility but had to do some struggling to make it work. This website helped me iron out the kinks.
ES File Explorer includes both an FTP server and FTP client option. The server option is hidden in the Settings section for the old version I prefer on the NST (1.6.2.3) but there is an option to add a shortcut to the home screen. You turn on WiFi and tap the shortcut and the FTP address appears in the notification area. Tapping on the notification brings up the option to exit. Very neat.
The tricky part (here the website is really helpful) is setting up the client part on a tablet or phone. I run a newer but still old version of ES on my Nook Tablet because I think the current market version is way too bloated and complex. But the FTP option is there (not the same as Remote Manager, which is the server) under "Network". Follow the instructions from the website and you can easily connect to the NST, move and manipulate files, etc. I just tried it with an ebook I downloaded on my tablet yesterday. The only fly in the ointment is that I had to restart my NST before the book would appear in the Library. That is not typical for transferring via WiFi File Transfer or even USB. Perhaps if the book was transferred to a holding folder (like Downloads) and then moved locally via ES File Explorer into your book folder it would show up without a restart. Worth a try!