Samsung has recently released a pretty nice Phone, Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini. Water resistent etc etc.

Having that phone after some days I found a serious problem: how can you sync and backup your Samsung Galaxy S5 mini with your Apple Mac running the latest version Apple OSX 10.9 called Mavericks?

Of course you can use File transfer for Android to transfer single files / Folders. But being a iPhone user for quite some time, I was compfortable using Apple iTunes, simple to use, mostly no problems.

So what can you do with your Android Phone? According to Samsung you should use „Kies„. This is also avaliable for Mac.
Starting the Application in latest version:

:-/

So what now?
I found an tutorial: http://www.pavtube.cn/guide/make-kies-work-on-mountain-lion-108.html with a link to an older Version. First I check the linked file if it contains malware, nothing found.
I followed the instructions, started the Application, at least no crash.
Tried to install drivers for the device, but even then, no success for syncing my Android Samsung Galaxy S5 mini.

Last chance: Use Kies for Windows…

Anyone else any suggestions?

Is rooting of the device a possible solution? Maybe a virtual machine within OSX in order to run KIES and then pass USB to the virtual machine?

Is there any software available for syncing your Android device with Linux (Ubuntu, Debian etc.)?