The folks at iPhone Alley recently posted some nifty instructions on how to mount your iPhone’s filesystem directly onto your desktop with SSHFS, a MacFUSE extension, which uses SSH to mount your iPhone wirelessly to your Mac. Once mounted, the iPhone’s entire filesystem is available just like any other drive.

To accomplish this amazing feat, you first need to have SSH, which you can grab from Installer.app, installed on your iPhone. You should make sure that logging in via the Terminal actually works before using MacFUSE. The most common problem may be that your key has changed. Terminal will warn you of this when you attempt to log in. If that seems to be your problem, remove the “known_hosts” file from your /username/.ssh directory. Here are iPhone Alley’s explicit instructions.

How to:

• Grab the latest version of MacFUSE from Google Code.
• Get the SSHFS filesystem extension from Google Code as well.
• Install MacFUSE and reboot your Mac
• Move sshfs.app to a good spot, perhaps the Applications folder. It doesn’t matter.
• Launch sshfs.app and give it your iPhone’s IP address and log in using root. You will need to specify that the remote directory is / . If you don’t, things won’t work out.
• Enter the iPhone’s password. The default for versions 1.0.2 and earlier is dottie. Default for version 1.1.1 is alpine.