Under the old version of the IDE there is a tool to upload data to the ESP32 SPI Flash File System, ESP32 Sketch Data Upload. The tool is available on GitHub at me-no-dev/arduino-esp32fs-plugin and is copied to esp32fs.jar in a subdirectory under the tools directory in the users Arduino directory.
This tool does not appear in the tools menu of the v2 IDE unlike the earlier versions of the IDE.
Is this something still development?
Hi @esp32croft. There are definitely some important tools which are now no longer available in the Arduino IDE 2.x. In addition to the 3rd party tools such as me-no-dev/arduino-esp32fs-plugin, me-no-dev/EspExceptionDecoder, and several others, the Arduino's own official "WiFi101/WiFiNINA Firmware Updater" tool was lost.
I don't know a lot about the classic Arduino IDE's tools system, but I get the feeling they are pretty specific to its Java code base, meaning it would be difficult to add direct support for them in Arduino IDE 2.x, due to it having a radically different code base which shares absolutely nothing with the previous one.
Something that might offer a lot of potential for new extension is that the Theia IDE framework Arduino IDE 2.x is based on supports VS Code extensions. In fact, the Arduino IDE 2.x's integrated debugger is a VS Code extension:
I realize this talk of VS Code extensions doesn't mean a lot when we're talking about the existing Java tools though.
There is a bug report about this missing functionality here:
If you like, you can subscribe to that to get notifications of any progress on improving this situation.