Be aware also that not everything on the phone is accessible as "USB mass storage."

How about using mtpfs? These instructions are for Debian Wheezy but it may be useful:
http://roger.steneteg.org/299/mount-...bian-7-wheezy/
I find this more reliable & faster than using wifi.

The easy way to access your phone is to install Airdroid on it. You then run it on the phone and get an address to put into your browser. This lets you access everything on the phone through the browser. If you want to go the other way, you can install Teamviewer on both your phone and PC, and access the PC from the phone. No need for cables or anything else, just wifi. IME, wifi is the easiest and most reliable way to transfer information between devices.

I have Airdroid, but anything I copy off the phone through it has messed up permissions.

Messed up in what way?

Ummm, after some thinking, I need to tap myself on the head. It's easier that whatever, just use bluetooth, "share" the whole folder and let that contents arrive in the "public" folder of the user space...
Tried it on a Mint Linux, and bamm, all pictures are safe. Okay, so I may not/never get to the WattsApp logs, but so what...
Thor
(marking this as solved, as for me, it is - but, feel free to continue this thread )

[QUOTE=sgosnell;5105118]Messed up in what way?[/QU
permissions are blank, I have to go manually assign user and group and permissions to each file.

Does Android use the same permissions as Linux? I've never looked at Android permissions, never had the need. I'll have to check the permissions sometime when I move some files from my phone to my Linux box. I know rsync has an option to keep permissions or not, but I've never investigated that with Airdroid.

just thought of something... i am using clockworkmod to restore from a backup image and i just realized it has the ability to present to the pc as a usb mass storage device for both the fones internal storage and external sd.

the only downside is you would have to reboot your fone to recovery in order to mount it on a pc

I've never had to change/reset permissions when copying/moving via USB, my guess it Airdroid is clearing off anything not windows compatible for it your using a windows client to access it. More of an annoyance to have to do the extra step than anything else.

I don't connect via usb anymore anyway, $35 has me an owncloud server syncing my files wirelessly.

I'm not using Windows to access Airdroid. I don't even have a computer with Windows installed. Airdroid might be removing permissions, but I don't know if that's true. I've never seen the point in connecting via USB, it's far easier to use wifi or bluetooth, or just doing a direct transfer by removing the microSD and transferring that way. That's what I use to transfer large files, and many music files most of the time.

update: A quick check of transferring files via Airdroid seems to show, at least on my system, that the files get the permissions of the folder they're transferred to. I have no idea how to check the permissions they have on the phone, but once they're transferred to my Debian system, they have whatever permissions the folder they go into has.