My environment: Smart phone running Android version 6.0.1, and computer running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS
I have a few key folders on my phone that I would like to back up regularly. For simplicity sake, let us say that I am just dealing with the “Camera” folder which holds all my latest photographs. The following commands makes use of gvfs-commands (Gnome virtual file system) to copy/move files, assuming the phone has been connected via USB to the computer, and the phone has been unlocked.
The bash script I currently run looks like this:
#!/bin/bash
for D in /run/user/1000/gvfs/*
do
gvfs-copy ${D}/Phone/DCIM/Camera/*.* /picfolder/
gvfs-move ${D}/Phone/DCIM/Camera/*.* /tmpfolder/
gvfs-move /tmpfolder/*.* ${D}/Phone/Pictures/1-ToSort/
echo "${D} done"
done
As you may have noticed, I took the safe approach of copying the photos to my computer, then moving the same photos again to a temporary directory on my computer, and finally moving the temporary files back onto the phone in an archive folder. The final steps effectively represents a move from the Camera folder on the phone to the archive folder on the phone; this is because gvfs-move does not support the move of files within the same device at this time.