Mounting My Phone as a Filesystem
After a lot of time spent trying to find the right app/software for getting things off my phone into my computer (I have spent probably days now, accumulated over my lifetime of phone-ownership; this shouldn't be so hard), I just gave up and wrote a little FUSE script to mount the phone as a directory in Linux.
It is very basic and relies on adb (android debug bridge) being installed on the PATH, but if it is present, I was able to just type:
$ mkdir -p phone $ python android-fuse.py phone &
To get the phone mounted as a directory:
$ cd phone $ ls -l total 656 drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Jan 1 00:44 acct drwxrwx--- 1 luispedro 2001 0 Jan 6 12:30 cache[...] Now, I could navigate the directories and files from the phone to the computer (uploading files in is not available as I don't need it). What was nice was that, using fusepy (which also needs to be available), the code wasn't too hard to write even. Then I was able to see where my phone hard drive disk was going (I keep running out of disk space) and delete a few Gigabytes of pictures I had anyone already saved somewhere else (by making sure the hashes matched). It's available at: https://github.com/luispedro/android-fuse. But rely on it at your own risk! It a best-attempt code and works on my phone, but I didn't vet it 100%. It's also kind of slow to list directories and such. (It may also work on Mac, as Mac also has FUSE; but I cannot test it).