syncfat

A dodgy ripoff of rsync for my music files. MTP mounts have been very flakey for me in the past. FAT32 and exFAT filesystems have restrictions on what filenames are allowed. This combination makes transferring music to my phone difficult.

This script helps. It takes care of munging filenames appropriately, checking if a file needs updating in case of a partial or failed transfer, and copying only subsets of your library. If a file already exists at the destination with the same file size, it will not copy.

To copy the contents of ‘Zechs Marquise/Getting Paid/’ and ‘Grails/’ from your music library to your mounted phone:

$ syncfat --source $HOME/Music \
        --destination /mnt/phone/Music \
       'Zechs Marquise/Getting Paid/' \
       'Grails/'

The source defaults to pwd. This script works best when you are in the source directory, as you can leave off the source and tab-complete files to copy:

$ cd $HOME/Music
$ syncfat --destination /mnt/phone/Music \
       'Zechs Marquise/Getting Paid/' \
       'Grails/'

This never deletes files, and should not be used for transferring back to your music library. It is designed specifically for transferring to intermittent FAT devices. File names are munged on the destination to fit FAT naming restrictions, as well as other conversions that might happen.