Merging folders when copying & pasting in Finder

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I've recently switched from Windows 7. One Windows feature that I'm missing is the possibility to merge folders (the German version of Windows is calling this "integrate") when copying & pasting them.

The merge feature works like this: if you paste a folder into a location that already contains a folder of that name, you get the option to merge the content of both folders. The files from the new folder will be pasted into the existing one; on conflicts, you get a choice what to do.

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Finder doesn't seem to support this: the only choice I get is to overwrite the older folder with the new one (with no explanation of what exactly this does), or stop the process.

Is there a way to merge folders in Finder? Am I overlooking something?

Best Answer

Because of a lot of complaints of people used to the Windows way, merging folders is now a feature in OSX Lion :

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This merge dialog will only show up if:

  • destination folder isn't empty
  • destination folder contents are different from to be copied one

So the way to merge folders in an officially supported way is to upgrade to Lion :-)

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