Between my Girlfriend and I, we have 4 android devices here (2 HTC evo 4g phones, a nexus7 and a galaxy tab 10.1). We also have a Fedora server with a bunch of storage on it that is encrypted and backed up. This weekend I spent a bit of time looking into options for using my existing storage with the android devices and also how to get them on regular backups and see about syncing things like books between them.
First as far as backups on the android side there was really only one choice: TitaniumBackup. I already had the pro version and all my devices are rooted. It’s pretty easy to set it up on each device and ask it to schedule backups however you want.
Next step was getting that backup up to the Linux side. I looked at Titianum media sync, but it didn’t sound like it would do what I wanted and it was a pay app with no preview. Some further looking around found “FolderSync”, which had a ‘Lite’ version limited to 2 accounts. So far looking at it today this looks like it will do the job. You can have it use sftp to sync, and tell it either ‘download’ ‘upload’ or ‘both directions’. You can set it to delete or not, and you can setup as many folders as you like. You can also schedule syncs. So, I simply setup a sync for the TitianiumBackup folder after it runs. I’ve got it all setup now, will see how it works tomorrow after everything is supposed to fire off. 😉
On to books. I use coolreader. It’s open source and has tons of features. It stores all it’s data under /sdcard/.cr3/ (sqlite db’s of positions in books, covers, cached copies of books, etc). Syncing that folder works fine, however, coolreader doesn’t see that the db’s have changed under it, so you have to make sure it’s closed before syncing. ;( In order for it to work with FolderSync I think it’s going to have to check and see if things have changed under it and load the new db’s (perhaps an option). I’m not sure how hard that would be add, but the code is available at least. In the mean time I guess I will only manually sync it from the device I am using and make sure others aren’t running it until I manually sync and start. If folks have some information about other readers handling this better or know a workaround for coolreader I’m all ears. 😉
For Photos FolderSync seems to work fine. Just sync your DCIM directory up.
I tend to stream things like video and audio content, but I could easily set them up to sync if needed.
So, if all works well with FolderSync, I’ll probibly support them by buying the full version (even though I actually can do everything I want with the free one right now).