flash drive posts

There have been some other utilities that turn your iPhone/iPod touch into a flash drive, but this one is free and very easy to use. It's called iPhone Explorer. You install the app on your Mac, or your PC (there's an app for each platform) and you're ready to go. You'll see your iPhone appear when it's plugged into your computer. You can view the folder structure, and drag and drop items to or from the iPhone to your desktop or back the other way.

You can create, delete and rename folders on your iPhone. If your iPhone is jailbroken, you can access the real root and then recover things like your address book, emails and SMS messages.

if you want to do this over a wireless network there is Discover and Air Sharing. Discover is free, Air Share is U.S. $2.99.

I'm not really sure why Apple didn't allow this functionality to begin with, but that's Apple just being Apple. I tried iPhone Explorer on my desktop Mac and it connected to my iPhone 3GS in a split second and I was good to go. Don't expect to be able to interact with your iPhone with this app in any complex way. It's really just giving you flash drive capability, and if that's what you want, this is a good place to get it.

In 2007 I thought that my 8GB iPhone was as large as I would ever need. Two and a half years later and I've already filled up the 16GB storage of my iPhone 3GS. Enter AirStash, an expandable flash drive (via SD memory) that you will be able to access from your iPhone. Simply plug AirStash into your Mac, drag and drop some files to the mounted volume, and head then out the door with AirStash and iPhone in your pocket.

How the technology works is currently unclear (expect to see a demo at CES 2010), but a logical solution would be that AirStash automatically syncs its contents with an off-site server -- similar to what Dropbox does today. If it truly is as portable as that, it will obviate Dropbox's (and MobileMe's) need to install any client software if you are, for instance, using a friend's computer. Personally, I'd like to see Apple purchase Dropbox and turn MobileMe's cloud storage into something usable; but in the interim, I'm excited by the prospect that AirStash provides.

[via Engadget]

Constantinos had a problem that I suspect some other folks have as well. He stores data on flash drives which he carries around between multiple Macs and after losing one of his drives he wanted to work up some kind of automated backup plan. His solution was to work up a method for making an automated backup of the drive every time he plugged it in. Although there were previous approaches to this problem using an Pref Pane called Do Something When, Constantinos wanted a solution that would not depend on having a 3rd party program installed on each of his Macs. Working off of an Apple supplied Folder Action for inspiration, he whipped up a nice solution that uses a Folder Action on the /Volumes folder so that each time he plugs in a drive it runs a backup script that calls rsync to do the actual backing up. (One potential downside of this is that you leave a copy of your data on each machine you plug into).

Check out Constantinos' solution here, but this got me thinking that this would work just fine in the other direction as well. That is, you could set up a Folder Action that would immediately copy over changes in your, say, ~/Documents folder every time you plugged in a flash drive. And of course there's nothing limiting this to flash drives, iPods or external HDs could serve as well. And if you don't have Constantinos' reasons for avoiding it, check out our previous tip using the free Do Something When, which makes this process even easier.

[Via MacOSXHints]