About a month or so ago, I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. To be honest, I was a little worried at first about the idea that I might ruin it, but not only did it work the first time trying, but it was incredibly simple. One of the features my new iPhone JB has is the ability to ssh to and from it and I can record video. Unfortunately, my Cycorder (video recording program) doesn’t have a built-in way to get the videos from my phone to anywhere else. My desire to share a humorous video of the cats with my wife now seemed a near impossible act. Sync won’t do it. Email won’t do it. My Flickit app won’t see anything outside my photo album.
Getting from here to there
Crossing my fingers, I downloaded the FTP On The Go app from the app store. I needed an FTP application, anyway. Sadly, it is bound to the same constraints as every other iPhone AppStore app, meaning it can’t see files outside its own directory tree. That’s great from a security and privacy standpoint, but it left me still searching for a solution. I wrote the author of the app, who quickly confirmed two things for me: 1. The application can only upload files from within its own file tree and 2. yes, moving files into that tree should do the trick.
Armed with a new game plan, I set out to take back control of my iPhone and the files on it. First, I tried making a symbolic link from the Cycoder Videos folder to the Documents/Files folder FTP On The Go provides. That didn’t work at all. I thought it was because FTP On The Go didn’t recognize the folder, thinking it was just a file. Next, I tried making a symbolic link from the video, itself to the Documents/Files folder. This also didn’t work, and I suspect that it’s because FTP On The Go is not following the symbolic link properly. I’m also guessing that’s part of the iPhone’s security rules. Eventually, I settled for placing the video directly into the target folder, after which it uploaded just fine to my server.
Why go to all the trouble?
I can connect to my iPhone over my wireless network via SSH and SFTP (Secure FTP), pop into the videos directory, and download whatever I want right to my laptop. That being said, some may question the longer method mentioned above. If I was home this morning that would have been the method used and you wouldn’t be reading this. At my office, my computer is wired, so I had no computer connected to the wireless network (it’s a different network). This makes the simple act of connecting directly to the iPhone over my wireless network all that much harder. Additionally, there will be times when I have a video (or some other file) on my iPhone that I need to move to a server, my laptop, etc. while I am not near a computer. When that happens, I’ll need a solution that relies completely on the capabilities that rest in the palm of my hand. It’s better to figure this out now than when that really is all I have to work with and need something fast.
What I’ve learned
First of all, I’ve learned that symbolic links won’t work and I REALLY wish they did. I would much rather link to the video folder (and my SNES ROMS folder) once. Without symbolic links, I have to copy any file I want to FTP every time. I’ve also learned, while poking around in the file system, that there’s a lot of raw files to play with. Perhaps there’s even a hidden setting somewhere to loosen up my symbolic linking. Either way, it’s a lot of fun to dig around and see what other trouble I can find. Just for kicks, the video can be seen below.
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