Quickly synchronize large folders on Android 4 Kitkat without taking out SD Card

You are correct - the price you pay for using Google services is that you are giving them information on what your are doing. This has been their business model for a long time. It is difficult to impossible to avoid being tracked, Intel and Microsoft made changes to both hardware and software to make it easier to isolate individual users. I distinctly remember thinking, maybe people will just keep using Windows 95 and not use the more "modern" hardware and software to avoid what they are doing... That's unrealistic.


The other thing habbajabba, you need to make a serious effort to post threads about disabling features that annoy you so much, there are ways to disable lots of that stuff, but only so that they don't annoy us - you are not going to be able to use modern technology without them tracking you - period.


So to address what you posted,

habbajabba said:

I actually did disable Update from the startup process on my rooted phone and it still notified me shortly after the next boot of updates I didn't want. If pos google allowed for actual disabling of aps which would include not constantly telling you to update that what is disabled, I might work with them.

Click to expand...

They do, start a thread and we can figure out where you went wrong, it IS possible to disable updates and not be notified, I make it a point to figure all that out on every phone I ever used.

habbajabba said:

As it stands, you CAN NOT disable system aps properly UNLESS you root device

Click to expand...

You are correct here, rooting is mandatory to disable certain HUGE annoyances. How about that startup and shut down sound - it's pretty incredible you can't disable those unless you are rooted.

habbajabba said:

As for syncing a folder; After rooting you can use the free apk, NextAp's "SDFix", which gives you r/w permissions to your sd card allowing you to free up internal memory, move aps, etc.. My Xperia phone still only shows up as Z3 in explorer. BUT; changing usb connectivity from media transfer mode to mass storage mode, now my sd card has it's own letter in explorer. Z3 is gone. Sweet!

Click to expand...

I used the SDfix by NextApp - great company by the way - but I cannot get the drive letter to show because I am using a Samsung Galaxy, they do not allow it and are even more limiting that Google as far as what can be changed.


I would use CyanogenMod by the way - to avoid all the problems that we are talking about, I am waiting for a more mature version to be released before switching.

I did not read the entire thread, but this is what I use:

Cheetah Synch - I set it to auto sync daily at the time I'm normally asleep, but it does have the option to manually sync when you choose. You need to run the server on the PC you sync to, and of course, the PC needs to be on when it does sync, but this would be the case if you were plugging the device to your PC anyway. It's not the speediest, as it downloads the directory and file information, does a comparison, then syncs what is needed to be synched according to your settings, but I've found it to be hassle free (I always had connectivity issues when connecting via USB to my PC, especially the device disappearing during big sync jobs over USB).

It can't bypass the security headache Google created with the newer versions of Android, so as pointed out, root + Next Aps SDFix would be needed.

Yes. Although its free version limits you to one sync operation, Cheetah is the one I fully figured out how to use in the past. Thanks for the reminder.

Cheetah and ALL sync software that syncs *without* the phone being displayed as a drive letter take f-o-r-e-v-e-r in comparison to when you can get the drive letter to show up. I am talking about very large number of files inside a folder.

Syncing my sd card is not nearly as important as being able to backup the phone with all it's settings etc. TG Team Win Recovery Project exists and is installed on my phone. Pulling my sd card out and using free file sync to create a backup once in a while is really nbd. I did however after my last root and flash update get wifi stuff to work (I just checked using wifi file exp pro). Even so, HFS is still the easiest thing to work with imho.

Interestingly enough, OsmAnd~ works quite well. I am almost tempted to uninstall google maps now without waiting for my new laptop. On my phone I need a browser, text ap, email ap, map ap, video/audio players and not much else. So far, almost everything I have on my phone can be had through f-droid (and updated through f-droid). I'll wait a while longer just to make sure I don't have to do this all over again before I gut google, the play store, update, all of it. One last thing I'm going to check is to remove my sim card, disable wifi and check to make sure my map software still works.

^OsmAnd~ works great with no sim or wifi. SatStat is an excellent gps companion as well.

Sorry for the bum steer on Bit Torrent Sync. The 1.X version always worked great for me, dont know why you had problems with one-way syncing unless you accidentally configured the one-way backwards (phone to PC instead of PC to phone). As for the 2.0 'Upgrade', I totally agree with you on this one, I was caught off guard by it and am now MUCH less enamored with BT-sync. The new version is much harder to use and it's potentially expensive, though the 10 folder limit does NOT apply to sub-folders, therefore it's less of a problem than it might seem. Overall, I am unhappy with BT-sync now, I think they borked a potentially great product. I'm also not too wild about the alternatives like g-drive and dropbox either.