This is actually a very simple question, but it’s going to take a lot of words to describe. Sorry.
I often back up files on my Mac, which involves moving lots of folders and files from one place to another. Let’s call them “Source” and “Destination”. I often run into the following scenario: in Source, I have a folder called Folder. Inside Folder are files D, E, and F. Due to a previous backup, Destination also has a Folder, containing files A, B, and C. When I attempt to move Folder from Source to Destination, a popup pops up telling me that I already have a Folder at Destination, and gives me two options. Either I can stop, leaving all the folders and files where they originally were, or I can Replace. If I replace, Source Folder will be gone, but Destination Folder will contain only files D, E, and F. A, B, and C will be permanently and irretrievably deleted, as far as I can tell.
What I want is a “combine” option, so that the computer sees what’s happening and just adds D, E, and F to the Destination Folder, resulting in one tidy little Folder at Destination now holding files A, B, C, D, E, and F.
Is there any way to make it do that? I’m running Mac OS X 10.6.8, if that matters.
I’ve never seen that before. Are you absolutely certain that Destination does not contain any folders named A, B, C, maybe from a previous attempt to move files?
I think what Smeghead actually means is that he has A0 B0 C0 and A1 B1 C1 and wants to retain copies of A B and C at both time 0 and time 1. I’m pretty sure he used different letters to help clarify things for us.
The best solution is to use Time Machine. It will backup your files anytime you make revisions to them, keeping your old versions. You’ll use much less disc space because if 90% of the files in A1 are the same as A0 you won’t make a 2nd copy of them. The other big benefit is that you don’t have to remember to do it - it’s automatic and unobtrusive. It’s also free and built into OS X and you can set it up to use whatever external disc you want.
If you really don`t want to do that for some reason you could easily write a shell script that copies A B & C to destination and renames them A+date, B+date C+date. You could also zip the whole lot of them after copying and name the zip file with the date, which would be even better since it’ll conserve disc space.
I do use Time Machine, but for reasons too boring to get into, I also want these particular files backed up separately on a different drive.
And just to clarify - the folders at Source and Destination have the same name, but the files within the folders have different names. I’m not dealing with duplicate files, or files with the same name, at any point. It’s only the folder name that’s duplicated.
It’s not so much a “bug” in earlier versions as it is a nonexistent feature. This is behavior that, notably, Windows had that OS X didn’t until 10.7 (Lion).
Though in Lion, the implementation does seem to have bugs.