I wanted to merge two folders with the same name, thinking it would do the same than with windows, but I discovered that with mac os it totally overwrited the content of the old folder.
Any way to retrieve the lost files?
I’m using SnowLeopard but sadly TimeMachine wasn’t activated, I’ve very recently updated my computer to SL and still learning how all the new things work 
Does undo work?
Undo put back the other folder where it was, but the original folder doesn’t exist anymore.
I ended up finding a back up of the files on my external disk, so thanks god I only lost a couple of files!
Have you looked in the trash?
Ok, I don’t want to kick you while you are down, but there are two things to learn from this:
Oh, yeah-
3) Always use Time Machine!
If you don’t want to install time machine for future mishaps, there are various undelete utilities you can download.
Yes, but they weren’t there.
Man you tell me, I had an ibook for a few years so I thought I knew most of the windows/mac differences. :smack:
The warning wasn’t that different from what XP tells me when I replace a folder by another, so I wasn’t suspicious and went right ahead. :smack:
That said, it does explain why I had the content of another folder disappearing a few months ago. Drove me crazy. I couldn’t explain how I had managed to somehow delete data that was important to me, but it never crossed my mind that replacing folders means something different in mac os.
Yeah I’ll do that, but my external HD is formatted in NTFS so I have to see if I need to pull stuff from it before formatting it again in a Time Machine friendly type.
For future reference, spend the $30 and upgrade to Lion. It will give you merge/replace options when you combine folders.