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For a long-term project, I'd like to set up a phone glued to a window, connected to power and record the sky all day every day for the next month. Ideally, I'd like it to be fully automated.

What I need is:

  • Full resolution video recording
  • Automatically moving video files to a NAS, Samba Share, Google Drive or Dropbox folder, FTP Server - anything were I don't have to manually fiddle with the phone.

Also acceptable:

Some app that, instead of recording video, merely watches a folder, copies it's contents to one of the locations mentioned above and frees up the phone storage again. This would solve my problems sufficiently, as there are many camera apps that take care of recording continuously.

Thanks!

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  • "moving" means it would be OK if it recorded locally, split the files every 30min, and afterwards copy the finished files to your NAS (or the copying could be done by a second app)? Ah yeah, you wrote that. FolderSync could accomplish the copy part, it has a mode to delete files after copying them (at least in the paid version). If that's acceptable, I can make it a full answer.
    – Izzy
    Commented Jun 12, 2018 at 11:32
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    That would be perfectly acceptable, yes. I'd gladly upvote and (possibly) accept your answer. Thanks!
    – Kjeld Schmidt
    Commented Jun 12, 2018 at 12:11

2 Answers 2

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As you wrote an app watching the recording folder and performing the transfer would suffice: There are several apps to sync files and folders. I use FolderSync Pro (the paid version, coming for around 3 bucks). It's very versatile, supporting a lot of protocols including cloud services and own cloud services (not just literally, but including WebDAV, Samba, SFTP) – so it can deal with your NAS.

Next to bidirectional and unidirectional sync (i.e. two-way or one-way), it also supports "one-way and delete after copy", which most likely is what you are after.

FolderSync FolderSync FolderSync
FolderSync Pro (source: Google Play; click images for larger variants)

Unfortunately, the app comes with some trackers (Crashlytics, Firebase). But I've not yet found an alternative app with a comparable feature set. It works very reliable, I'm using it for years myself.

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  • 1
    This is great, as it has a plethora of upload target options. I happen to prefer m Samba Share and it supports it. Someone else might go with their FTP, or a paid Dropbox plan or whatever. The ~3$ for the app are totally worth it for me. It's not quite working as uninterrupted recording yet, but I haven't debugged whether it's the camera app or FolderSync itself.
    – Kjeld Schmidt
    Commented Jun 19, 2018 at 14:11
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    That was one of my concerns: FolderSync touching incomplete recordings. No idea how to deal with that. You could approach the dev: the app might be able to "skip locked files" (always assuming the camera app locks the file while writing to it, which should be the case). Or the other way around: asking the camera dev to use "temporary file names" while the file is still written to, and exclude those from sync (e.g. by file extension, or by the camera app storing them outside the sync dir while recording).
    – Izzy
    Commented Jun 19, 2018 at 14:54
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    Both of these sound like smart suggestions, thanks! The second specifically sounds like it might be the culprit. It's usually been the camera stopping with all files synced, not a failure on the sync side.
    – Kjeld Schmidt
    Commented Jun 19, 2018 at 15:38
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  1. Prepare a SMB server somewhere (for instance with Linux/Samba)
  2. Mount it on your Android device
  3. Set your videocamera app to record to that location (or create a symlink, but for that you might need to change your filesystem)
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  • Thanks! I didn't realize you could natively mount a NAS under Android. Of course, it needs root - I'll have to look into rooting that phone.
    – Kjeld Schmidt
    Commented Jun 12, 2018 at 12:12

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