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One of the biggest inconveniences about the Motorola Droid is the lack of ease when it comes to sync media. (videos, music – whatever) Now I could always plug in the phone via USB, mount the SD card and transfer files that way, but it just seems to take way to many steps.

What you’ll need:
Android 2.0 phone (may work on earlier version)
FTPServer (from Android Market Place)
SyncBack (Windows only)
Wifi Connection

Once you’ve downloaded FTPServer onto your phone, go in and enter in the FTP server information you will use to login.

User – username you will use to login via SyncBack
Pass – password you will use to login
Port – must be greater than 1023 (I used 2000)
Default dir – if you want to start off in a certain directory on the phone enter it here (you must know it though since you can not browse for it)

Next just check “Accept connections” under the wifi name and “Any Network”.

Press “Save and Restart Service” to start the FTP server on your phone. I usually takes around 5-15 seconds for the FTP service to fully start.

Below is how I like to have the files synced in SyncBack but please feel free to play around with the settings to best fit your needs. I use it to sync podcast that were downloaded through iTunes and I want what ever is in the directory on my PC to be what’s on the phone. So if I delete a file on the PC, I want it to remove it from the phone on the next sync.

Next you’ll need to install SyncBack. Once it’s installed open the program and create a new profile. You should be prompted with a “Profile type” menu. I chose “Backup:…” but this is really up to you how you want to sync your files.

Next go ahead and click on the “Expert” button at the bottom to give you the needed extra options. Then from the “Simple” tab choose “Backup the source directories files, including all it’s sub-directories”.

Then click over to the “Advanced tab and choose the following options:

Next click over to the FTP tab and click on the “The destination directory is on an FTP server” check box and enter in the FTP information you entered into the FTPServer app. (The phone’s IP should be at the top of the screen within FTPServer) Then go ahead and click on the “Test FTP settings” just to make sure everything is working ok. You should get a message saying “The FTP server was logged onto”. If you don’t go back and double check your login details and you may want to ever restart the app.

Next go up to the top of SyncBack and choose the source directory. (the directory you want to copy from your PC to the phone) Then do the same for the destination directory. This should ask you if you want to connect to the FTP server – choose yes and find the folder you want to drop the files into. (Your SD card is located at /sdcard – you can create new folders by right clicking) I created a “podcast” folder to dump all my podcast into.

Next you can either access the profile from within SyncBack or your can create a shortcut on your desktop by dragging the profile to your desktop. This will allow you to just click on the icon you start the file backup.

If you have any problems with connecting to the FTPServer app, try restarting the FTP service and if that does not fix it, force kill the app and reopen it.

Note: If you sync media (video or pictures), Android will not recognize them until you restart the device. Android has to read the contents of the SD card and for some reason it can not do it on the fly. Maybe it updates it’s media database only on demand.

Pros:
- very easy to use once setup
- no more cables required

Cons:
- can take a while over wifi if file are large
- requires restart when syncing media
- FTPServer app does not work 100% of the time (very minor gripe since it does a very good job most of the time)

Now if you want to really get geeky, you could install the DynDns app and sync files from anywhere in the world – useful if you have a laptop but no wifi connection. But that’s for another tutorial.

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