In Lion, whenever I drag and drop a file to or from an external drive to the local drive it always moves the file. If I'm not mistaken the default behavior is to copy the file right? Does anyone know why it might be doing this or know of a preference anywhere that I can set it to explicitly copy the files?
MacOS – Lion always explicitly moves files to and from external drives
file-transferfindermacos
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I haven't found any documentation for this feature yet, so I don't have any specific answers for your questions about interactions with external Time Machine drives.
However, I did do some playing around with the feature while using my laptop on battery. The first thing I noticed is that local snapshots were not enabled by default – for me, at least. I know that because "entering" Time Machine while my backup drive was detached resulted in the usual error message — until I executed the following from a command line:
sudo tmutil enablelocal
After I did this, a hidden volume called MobileBackups was created (in /Volumes) and I was able to "enter" Time Machine. (Perhaps local snapshots weren't enabled on my machine because I have less than 10% free disk space?)
Unfortunately, the feature seems a little half-baked. I tried the following, with pretty unsatisfactory results:
- Created a new folder,
~/Documents/Test. - Forced a new snapshot by running
tmutil snapshot. - Verified that a new snapshot was created by looking in
/Volumes/MobileBackups/Backups.backupdb/hostname/Latests/drivename/Users/myname/Documents. - Deleted the
Testfolder. - Entered Time Machine and browsed the backups/snapshots. The
Testfolder was not there in any of the backups.
Update: I installed Lion on a second Mac, and without any explicit action on my part, this Mac has a MobileBackups volume. And restoring deleted files from a local snapshot works on this Mac.
The option you mention in System Preferences does exactly what you say (or its behavior was changed since your question).
The first option, "Automatically based on input device" does what you want (I think, but I may have misunderstood your question). When you have a mouse plugged in, it shows the scrollbars. When you unplug your mouse, it will revert to the default of only showing scrollbars when you are scrolling.
I hope this answered your question. Please let me know if it doesn't, as I probably misunderstood what you are asking.
Best Answer
To copy files instead of move them, you can use menu items in the Edit menu, or their associated keyboard shortcuts. I am running Lion, and I have an external usb drive. If I select a file on this external drive and open the Finder's "Edit" menu, there's a "Copy" menu item with the shortcut Cmd-C.
Choosing that menu item, then selecting a folder on my internal hard drive, gives a menu item of "Paste" (again in the "Edit" menu) with the shortcut Cmd-V.
Also, dragging and dropping with the option key held down will copy a file rather than move it.