How To Access iPad Files From the Finder using Netatalk

Netatalk, for those of you unfamiliar with it is a free jailbreak app that conveniently allows you to access your iDevice’s entire file system remotely from the Finder. Put more simply, it’s the perfect solution to access all of your iPad, iPhone and iPod files directly, for FREE.

Netatalk is a free and open source implementation of Apple Talk for Unix devices which, basically, lets you use Apple’s standard file sharing between a Mac and an iPhone, in the Finder. And luckily for us, an iPad: Netatalk is compatible with iPhone OS 3.2, so feel free to fire up Cydia and install it. If you still have to jailbreak your iPad and get going with Cydia, you can read our post here. Once you’ve installed Netatalk, the iPad will respring. To get Netatalk to work you’ll have to reboot though, and if you’re using SBSettings (also from Cydia, a must have tool) tap on Power, then Reboot and wait for the iPad to restart. It should take around 10 seconds.

Now take a look at your Finder sidebar, ’cause a nice iPad icon should be there under the “Shared” tab. Make sure that both the devices (iPad and Mac) and using the same local network. This is the kind of Netatalk magic we were talking about before. Now click on it and the Finder will ask you a username and password to access the device: the default ones are “root” and “alpine”, but you can read this tutorial here on how to change the password. Anyway, choose to remember the connection and here you go: you’re now browsing your iPad file system.

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