Hey !
I've searched the web as well as the forum but i didn't find any solution and it seems i'm not the only one wanting to do that.
Is it possible to see hidden folders of internal sdcard through MTP ?
I really talk about hidden folder like ".android_secure", not the photos that aren't yet scanned by the media scanner service.
In my windows environment i already set the view all hidden files/folders as well as view system files.
If i have to change folders permissions through terminal what are the correct permissions i should put ?
Thanks for the help !!
Am i the only having that problem ?
Do you guys see the hidden folders through mtp connexion ?
If you'd bother reading a bit before asking questions, you might have the answer already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
MTP and PTP specifically overcome this issue by making the unit of managed storage a local file rather than an entire (possibly very large) unit of mass storage at the block level. In this way, MTP works like a transactional file system - either the entire file is written/read or nothing.
More or less, it is designed to keep hidden what should be hidden stick to USB storage or FTP/SCP.
PS: can't believe we're using a transfer protocol designed by Microsoft in a Linux-based system mastered by Google. The horror, the pain... no wonder it doesn't work on my Mac!
VAXXi said:
If you'd bother reading a bit before asking questions, you might have the answer already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
MTP and PTP specifically overcome this issue by making the unit of managed storage a local file rather than an entire (possibly very large) unit of mass storage at the block level. In this way, MTP works like a transactional file system - either the entire file is written/read or nothing.
More or less, it is designed to keep hidden what should be hidden stick to USB storage or FTP/SCP.
PS: can't believe we're using a transfer protocol designed by Microsoft in a Linux-based system mastered by Google. The horror, the pain... no wonder it doesn't work on my Mac!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thx for the link ! I knew what mtp is but its always good to refresh things up
I read the whole article and unfortunately it doesn't answer my question.
I understood that its the same for all of us meaning that we are not able to see hidden folders.
But the main question is if there is a way to bypass this behavior ? Where is this defined exactly ?
It seems according to the article that its not on the file permission layer ? Should it be at partition level ? How can mtp know what to share with the host ?
It's not a "behaviour" per se, but more/less a database. Remember that media scanner program which wakes up every time you change something on your SD card, be it internal or external ? it simply keeps a "database" of files which are presented to the MTP client (your computer) and hides away the phone's internal folders which are not supposed to be seen by the end-user.
Theoretically, this is done in order to have the iPhone-like behaviour: seeing the entire device memory as one big unified storage which you can fill as you want (no more of those partition size limitations which brought us the app2sd hacks). In my opinion, it's more or less just a small step done in order to "secure" phones for DRM protected content.
Studios and media companies require devices to have such measures of protection in order to allow you to sell media content (like movies, books, etc) and since Google wants to push its business further with the Play Store, it needs to cave in to the studios' demands. In the future, it will probably even become illegal (DMCA-style) for me to give you the information below
Back to the technical part of our show now.
At the first boot in the life of the device, Media Scanner will look under /system/media and index everything there. After that, it will scan everything under /mnt/sdcard (hence your external SD card too, if you have one, as it's mounted under /mnt/sdcard/external_sd). On some devices, you have an "internal.db" file and one "external-123xyz.db" file; that's a unique ID of the SD card which was scanned. The idea here is you might have 2-3 SD cards which you swap often, and it's not nice to do a full rescan each time you change the SD card. These databases are in /dbdata/databases/com.android.providers.media (on my phone, there is only one "external.db" for example).
So what you're looking for is a way to populate this database with all the files found by the Media Scanner. But Media Scanner doesn't want you to see the hidden folders you mentioned above. So, you get an application which doesn't ignore them, like Rescan SD Card! or SDrescan.
Happy now ?
Thank you very much i really enjoyed reading the explanation as it answers completely my questions and it makes sense !
Ill give a try to the apps but i'm also curious to investigate on those files
Cheers
PS. Is this a disguised way to support non open source protocols ?
Well, you could poke around inside the database with sqlite if you want. But don't really see what's so interesting about them.
It is just another protocol which is supported, which happens to be designed by Microsoft (and probably licensed/paid by Google to be used in Android). I understand the technical explanation behind this decision, but I'm also wary that someday UMS will be disabled by default and enabling it will disable content purchasing for that device (just like having a rooted phone now disables some "sensitive" apps, like banking and online TV).
As a system admin its interesting to know whats happening on my system
As a hobby its interesting for my personal knowledge
And from a development point of view it gives me some ideas for maybe future apps
You say that its just another protocol which is supported but to my understanding there are not so many of them ! So i would say that Google was kind of forced to use the MTP method, first from a hardware point of view and second to be compliant with the rest of the world.
Is there any other protocol that could suite their needs ? Since USB mass storage is not usable on some devices and MTP is well spead.
.HiddenAndroid folders in Win - Here Yesterday, Gone Tomorrow
<Win 7 and GN2>
What's curious and a bit frustrating to me is that, yesterday, when I mounted my device ALL of the hidden (.folders and .files) were visible and searchable. Today, when I went to explore some more, all are gone. I understand that I can use a 3rd party app, just can't figure out why it was visible yesterday and not today.
Hmmph
Did you ever resolve this issue? I really hate MTP for several reasons but this is one of the reasons why! I need to back up all my directories on the SDCard because some apps store them as hidden files in hidden directories. Furthermore, I came across the Play Store bug that requires me to delete a "temp.asec" file in the ".android_secure" directory, but of course it is not visible.
In a post further up it was suggested to use a "Rescan" app to force the DB to include hidden files/directories, but I have tried no less than 4 of these apps, and all they do is trigger the built-in android media scan, which is the problem in the first place!
So has anyone ever been able to access hidden files and directories using MTP?
EDIT: I have an HTC phone that actually shows hidden files and directories, so they have obviously implemented their own media scan. The problem I am currently having is on a Samsung phone (Epic 4G touch)
It may depend on the implementation. For example, using stock rom for the phone doesn't show some files and folders, for example folders starting with dot. But if you use Neatrom Lite it will show all files and folders.
Flash forward about 6 years and Samsung still does not show hidden folders/files when viewing the phone contents in Windows File Explorer, but HTC does.
The reason this is still a problem for me, is that I want to backup the contents of a particular directory (WhatsApp) which contains some hidden folders, so I can restore it anytime on a new phone or the same phone.
I recently switched from HTC to Samsung and alas, it seems the problem with this implementation still exists. Anyone found a workaround to this to allow File Explorer to see the hidden folders?
Update: It appears that hidden .nomedia files (and probably others) appear under regular folders, so the problem is limited to hidden folders themselves
Again, title says it all.
I searched and seems there are no "user-friendly" solutions to do this on any device.
Is it possible to make an APP or something that does that?
Else is a major waste.
I wonder why Google didn't think of a (user) "shared" folder concept when they added multi-user support. It's not like it would be a novelty.
no one?
i would like to share sdcard between users too as on cyanogenmod
You can share SD card between users in CM??? I didn't know.
Hi guys,
first off, if this is the wrong place for my post, please move it =)
My problem is as follows:
I have a embedded device running Android, that is being programmed using a SD card. For testing and development purposes, it is quite uncomfortable to utilize a SD card everytime.
What I would need, is a hardware/software combination to emulate a physical SD card and access files stored remotely on the LAN. WiFi, as well as Bluetotth and NFC are no options because I have several sensitive processes that may interfere or be interfered when WiFi is used.
My question is:
Does anybody know if such an adapter (LAN to SDcard) and/or software solution exists, and could that somebody please kindly point me in the right direction?
If anyone can hint me at a solution, that would be very cool.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
Hi guys,
I'm trying to get a lil' privacy here
I know right now it's rather hard, but I'm trying to take my steps. So far setting Seacloud with https and encryption on a 2TB HDD wasn't too hard. Problem is, it doesn't upload the phone pictures to the server, at the moment. A second solution would be to have an app to sync those pictures to a network drive, which is already on Seafile, and would be then automatically backed up. This could be done via SMB or SCP/SFTP. Do you know of any apps doing this, copying any new detected file within an specifed folder to a network share?
PS: Yeah yeah, I know owncloud does this out of the box. Their apps are far better for this, but the way they store their filesystem isn't very clean IMHO, so I preferred seacloud instead (owncloud uses normal files for its storage, which can lead to issues implementing file history, while seacloud uses a database structure).
Hi everyone,
I have a big problem with this box and I hope someone with experience will be able to help...
I got a 2TB hard drive to use as media storage (videos, music, pictures...) with my Mi box, but it seems there is no way I will be able to do that, I hope someone will prove me wrong.
What is possible is:
- for the box to hijack the whole drive, encrypt it and use it as internal storage. Unacceptable because I want to be able to use the drive with the data on other systems in case I want to transfer files (I don't even want to try transferring 2TB of data over wifi) and in case something happens to the box or I decide to upgrade to a different one, all my data would be lost.
- to use the external storage as read-only, which is useless, I might as well connect it to my TV then and play the contents...
I want to be able to download stuff to it in Android. For instance I could just remotely send torrent files to it while out and about and by the time I get home they would be downloaded. Or I can set all my pictures to be synced with a folder on that drive...
Regular versions of Android generally don't have a problem with this, but Android TV seems to lack the in-built Documents Android file manager functionality that allows for writing permissions once you select the drive (or an SD card) from within an app like Flud for example.
I was hoping upgrading to Nougat would fix this problem, but it seems it won't. The nVidia Shield has the same problem, but it's rootable and using the SDFix app when rooted saves the day.
Rooting would also allow me to use my PS4 controller with the box and other fun stuff, so I really wouldn't mind doing it, but a lot of people had bad experiences with rooting the Mi Box, so I would do it only if I'm sure it'll work.
Does anyone have any suggestions or is this a hopeless endeavour?
Thank you!
an app called airexchange allows you to access your tv box over your wi-fi and do anything you need, download, delete, move...this is the only and easiest way i found to transfer files from my mi box 4 to my pc. might help. just download and follow the instructions, super easy to use.