I’m not sure why but Google seems to love Linux in their datacenter but hate it everywhere else. Most of their apps no longer have native Linux versions (like Picasa) and if you’ve ever tried to plug the USB cable from your Android tablet into your Linux PC, you’ll will know what it feels like to live in hell.

For a while now I’ve been looking at different “wireless” solutions for getting media off my Linux server to my android tablet. I had settled on Filezilla -> FTPServer, however this app (and all the other FTP server apps I tried) seemed to crash a lot. Filezilla is good at reconnecting but you also need to keep restarting the FTP app. It’s painful.

So I tried going in the other direction. I’m using rsync backup to initiate an rsync from my tablet to the Linux server.

This seems to work pretty well, although it starts off very fast and progressively slows down. This seems to be an Android wifi issue because the FTP method did the same thing.

For reference, when you set up rsync backup, in the rsync command-line settings make sure you enable:

--size-only
--delete-before

And remove this (–times) because you can’t modify the timestamps on the /mnt/scdard filesystem for some reason:

-t

This method is slow but it’s more reliable than FTP.