After connecting your phone to your computer, go to your phone's settings and search for 'usb' or 'cable' and look for the option that says 'Enable File Transfer' (or something to that effect). Then, the phone will declare itself as a USB device and lsusb in Linux will show the device. Mount point can be any new or existing directory within your host filesystem. Use mkdir command to create a new mount point directory where you want to mount your USB device: # mkdir /media/usb-drive Mount USB Drive At this stage we are ready to mount our USB's partition /dev/sdc1 into /media/usb-drive mount point: # mount /dev/sdc1 /media/usb. Then, the phone will declare itself as a USB device and lsusb in Linux will show the device. Then, you install the ADB Linux toolkit (using apt install on Ubuntu/Debian or dnf install on Fedora) and you can then use: adb shell your-linux-shell-cmd-here.
You can drop down the push events and select there to mount your phone as a drive (MTP/PTP), you can select also only to charge power on phone. It depends of your android version. Here are a couple of images of what I'm talking about. In the Change Drive letter and Paths dialog box, select a pathname and click the Remove button. Click the Yes button to confirm. Removing a disk drive's mounting point from a folder doesn't delete the folder. In fact, you can use that empty folder again to reattach the disk drive or storage media in the first place.
It was easy to mount the original iPod and access it liks a USB drive. It's possible to do that with an iPhone, too, although there are different approaches depending on the type of data you want to work with. How do you download files from google drive.
In this article we'll explore the different approaches, and they're summarised below:
Fundamentally, on a non-jailbroken device it's not possible to work with data other than camera files and data from selected apps. In this article we look at both approaches.
PTP: Accessing Photos, videos and camera data as a disk mount
iOS automatically presents modern devices as cameras when they're connected over USB. This uses Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) which is a fairly limited system allowing you to copy photos back and forth. You'll probably recognise the DCIM folders that photos tend to appear in.
PTP has a number of drawbacks: most obviously, you can't access files other than from the camera. And PTP doesn't support functionality such as renaming or modify files or folders: instead, it must delete and recreate them to effect a change. This is slow.
Accessing photos & app data over AFC with iTunes
Apple's knowledge-base has an article describing how to manage rudimentary filesharing with iTunes.
Accessing app data over USB with FUSE
FUSE is a system that lets users mount drives on their Windows or Mac computers without needing to make administrator-level changes to their systems. FUSE stands for 'filesystem in userspace' and is available in different forms on most platforms. FUSE itself is an abstraction layer, in that it isn't the technology that communicates directly with the device or data source: usually, another approach is used for that. In the case of mounting an iPhone as a drive, FUSE would communicate with the iPhone using another protocol: SSH, AFC/AFC2, PTP or WebDAV. On Windows, the popular Dokan user-mode file system is often used, and on macOS osxfuse is popular.
From a user's perspective, because FUSE normalises the way the device's data is presented, it usually doesn't matter which underlying protocol is responsible for the mount.
Using a FUSE mount on macOS
Let's demonstrate that approach on macOS, and how to mount a device. In order for this to work, you'll need to install the free Homebrew package manager and be familiar with using the macOS Terminal.
First of all, let's find your device's UDID. You can do this with the free version of iPhone Backup Extractor, with the lsusb command, or with ioreg -p IOUSB -l -w 0. Run iPhone Backup Extractor whilst your device is connected, select your device, and choose the 'Info' tab. You'll see the UDID shown in the 'Hardware identifiers' section:
Next, let's get FUSE for macOS ready:
And let's install ifuse, which is the code that can communicate with iOS devices through FUSE:
With ifuse installed, it's possible to mount your iPhone or iPad using the UDID we obtained earlier:
That'll mount your iPhone as a disk on your machine. If you'd like to go further and dig into more data, this superuser post is rather handy, and similarly, this post covers off use of the usbmuxd tool.
Troubleshooting errors you might run into
ifuse might complain: Invalid device UDID specified, length needs to be 40 characters. Starting with the iPhone X, Apple changed UDIDs to use 24 bytes and a dash (-) instead of the old 40-byte format.
If you get Failed to connect to lockdownd service on the device. Try again. If it still fails try rebooting your device. ensure that your device is connected, and isn't displaying a 'Trust this computer' dialog. You'll need to approve that first. If you then get ERROR: Device 000000000000000000000000 returned unhandled error code -13 you'll need to disconnect and reconnect the device.
Whilst doing this, it pays to ensure no other applications are running on your PC or Mac which might be trying to connect to your iOS device.
If you're only ever going to mount a single iOS device, you can just run ifuse ~/iphone.
Need to use a pre-release version of usbmuxd?
How To Mount Phone As Disk Drive Windows 10
usbmuxd isn't frequently updated, so occasionally when a new version of iOS is released, it lacks support. To fix that, you can install the latest development version of it as below:
FUSE is a system that lets users mount drives on their Windows or Mac computers without needing to make administrator-level changes to their systems. FUSE stands for 'filesystem in userspace' and is available in different forms on most platforms. FUSE itself is an abstraction layer, in that it isn't the technology that communicates directly with the device or data source: usually, another approach is used for that. In the case of mounting an iPhone as a drive, FUSE would communicate with the iPhone using another protocol: SSH, AFC/AFC2, PTP or WebDAV. On Windows, the popular Dokan user-mode file system is often used, and on macOS osxfuse is popular.
From a user's perspective, because FUSE normalises the way the device's data is presented, it usually doesn't matter which underlying protocol is responsible for the mount.
Using a FUSE mount on macOS
Let's demonstrate that approach on macOS, and how to mount a device. In order for this to work, you'll need to install the free Homebrew package manager and be familiar with using the macOS Terminal.
First of all, let's find your device's UDID. You can do this with the free version of iPhone Backup Extractor, with the lsusb command, or with ioreg -p IOUSB -l -w 0. Run iPhone Backup Extractor whilst your device is connected, select your device, and choose the 'Info' tab. You'll see the UDID shown in the 'Hardware identifiers' section:
Next, let's get FUSE for macOS ready:
And let's install ifuse, which is the code that can communicate with iOS devices through FUSE:
With ifuse installed, it's possible to mount your iPhone or iPad using the UDID we obtained earlier:
That'll mount your iPhone as a disk on your machine. If you'd like to go further and dig into more data, this superuser post is rather handy, and similarly, this post covers off use of the usbmuxd tool.
Troubleshooting errors you might run into
ifuse might complain: Invalid device UDID specified, length needs to be 40 characters. Starting with the iPhone X, Apple changed UDIDs to use 24 bytes and a dash (-) instead of the old 40-byte format.
If you get Failed to connect to lockdownd service on the device. Try again. If it still fails try rebooting your device. ensure that your device is connected, and isn't displaying a 'Trust this computer' dialog. You'll need to approve that first. If you then get ERROR: Device 000000000000000000000000 returned unhandled error code -13 you'll need to disconnect and reconnect the device.
Whilst doing this, it pays to ensure no other applications are running on your PC or Mac which might be trying to connect to your iOS device.
If you're only ever going to mount a single iOS device, you can just run ifuse ~/iphone.
Need to use a pre-release version of usbmuxd?
How To Mount Phone As Disk Drive Windows 10
usbmuxd isn't frequently updated, so occasionally when a new version of iOS is released, it lacks support. To fix that, you can install the latest development version of it as below:
Accessing app data over USB with FUSE on a jailbroken device
The instructions are exactly the same as above. With the device jailbroken, you'll see more data straight away. Neat, eh?
Using Filza's WebDAV server for iOS root file access
On a jailbroken iOS device, it's possible to install a file manager app named Filza through Cydia. Under Fileza's settings, you can enable WebDAV server mode. This provides a fairly simple interface for other devices to access your iOS device, although it is extremely insecure. WebDAV is a very general mechanism for working with web data, and there are many clients which can access it: including a web interface that's built-in to Filza. Connect to your device with a web browser, and you'll see the interface. Easy.
Using AFC2 to access iOS files over USB
What is AFC2?
AFC stands for 'Apple File Conduit', Apple's own mechanism for transferring data from an iOS device to a host computer. AFC runs on every iOS device, but is locked down to only providing access to a limited set of data. 'AFC2' is the nickname given to a series of tools built by the jailbreaking community, emulating AFC but providing access to the entire device. The latest implementation of AFC2 was built by Cannathea and is available on GitHub.
AFC2 can be install from Cydia, and once installed will allow an AFC client to browse the device in its entirety.
Other techniques for accessing all data on jailbroken devices
Prior to the release of iOS 8, there were several Cydia plugin for jailbroken devices which would make an iPhone present itself as a USB stick when connected. Alas, there are no longer supported on modern versions of iOS.
Recovering deleted files from a mounted iOS device
If you can mount your iPhone or iPad as a drive, you might think you could recover deleted files by manipulating the filesystem directly on a jailbroken device. Unfortunately, you can't recover files this way from an iPhone as the filesystem is encrypted. How do you download adobe reader. Even if you could find bits of the data, you'd not be able to decrypt them. Each file has its own encryption key, and those keys are discarded on deletion.
Apple's iOS Security Guide covers this briefly on page 17 in the 'architecture overview':
Every time a file on the data partition is created, Data Protection creates a new 256-bit key (the 'per-file' key) and gives it to the hardware AES engine, which uses the key to encrypt the file as it is written to flash memory using AES-XTS mode. On devices with an A7, S2, or S3 SoC, AES-CBC is used. The initialization vector is calculated with the block offset into the file, encrypted with the SHA-1 hash of the per-file key.
Mounting can work well for getting to extant files, but it's not much help for recovery. For that, you either need an iTunes or iCloud backup, data synced with the iCloud, or a forensic image of the device from before the data was deleted.
Bonus: mounting your Windows computer from your iPhone or iPad
Mount Phone As Disk Drive
iOS 13 saw the introduction of SMB support to iOS. This allows users to remotely access drives on Windows computers. This is how it works:
Find the IP address of your Windows computer. The
ipconfigHow to download xbox app windows 10. command should tell you this.On the Windows computer, right-click the folder you'd like to share and choose
Properties→Sharing→Advanced sharing. Click 'Share this folder'.In the Sharing tab, select
Share.., then in the drop-down menu select your user account, add it, and make sure it has 'Read / write' permissions. Click 'Share' and 'Apply', and close the window.On your iOS device, open Apple's 'Files' app, tap 'Connect to a server'. Type
smb://followed by the IP address of your PC. Then choose 'Registered user' and enter your Windows account name and password.
With this done, your Windows drive should appear on the iOS device.
