My USB port has given up the ghost so, mindful of the fact people are getting non-N900s back from Nokia, I have bought a new(ish) one on eBay. I am wondering what the easiest/best way of transferring largish amounts on data 9several gigs of music, maps, books etc) from userland on my current device to the new one without resorting to cables or using a PC (as that's knackered as well ). Thoughts?

Can you ftp w/i your wlan?
What about setting up a vpn with your pc and old N900?
Even a full 32GB won't take that long ... will it?
Good luck. We're all going to need a solution to this at some point.

If you *have* to do this without a PC... it's a very good time to treat yourself to a nice new 32GB microSD card if you can, copy the whole eMMC onto it, put it in the new device and copy back.

Doing this over Wifi is entirely possible (tools to look at include rsync and/or sshfs), but your throughput will be around 1MB per sec so do expect it to take a VERY LONG time, allow 20-30 mins per GB and you shouldn't be disappointed. There are some notes on my own approach to cloning in this thread, which doesn't directly address your broken USB problem but may contain some useful hints about getting the kernel right before you restore a backup, and fixing your tracker databases after rsyncing music around.

If you need to do this over a network... get your batteries charged, both N900s on the same WiFi network, OpenSSH, backupmenu and rsync installed on both devices, make sure the new one is flashed to same PR and kernel as the old one... then post back if you need help with the actual transfer.

Edited to add: transferring several GB using rsync over WiFi is very likely to drain your battery before the task completes. You can swap batteries and resume if it does, just be prepared for the fact that it may happen.

Further note: I'm playing with rsync over WiFi this evening for unrelated reasons and was less than happy with the speed - hovering just below 1MB/sec while the wireless connection itself is at 54Mbit with good signal. I've found that using the -W switch to copy whole files and turn off the differential algorithm speeds up the transfer by a substantial margin, to 1.7 or 1.8Mb/sec in my case. This is still nowhere near what the wireless link should be capable of, so maybe rsync isn't the best approach to copying a ton of data when you're stuck without a USB connector.

Wonder if we can come up with some netcat magic for the fastest way to image the eMMC under these circumstances...

Edit: I must be bored, but just for shits and giggles I'm testing the approach described here from one N900's to another across a local wireless network. Pulling the charger and monitoring the current consumption using bq27200.sh, screen off, wifi at 10mW + powersave mode, I'm getting an average of 260mA, so we should be good for four to five hours of that on a fully charged battery. It's about 50% of the current consumption that I saw using rsync over ssh. To shift the whole 27648Mb of partition, inside an anticipated four hour battery life, we're looking for a throughput averaging 1.92Mb per second or better (based on 27648Mb in 14400 seconds). This should be more than achievable having cut the overheads to the minimum; the theoretical bandwidth of the wireless link is 6.75Mb/sec and we only need a third of that to get through. I'm off to bed for now, but, if it succeeds I'll post back with how long it took.