Merging folders when copying & pasting in Finder

Solution 1:

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 :-)

Solution 2:

Use rsync in terminal:

rsync -arvu SOURCE_DIR DEST_DIR --ignore-existing

The --ignore-existing flag will ensure that you do not overwrite files in the dest folder that are already there. Incidentally, if you want to sync with an external hard drive or USB drive look under the folder /Volumes (All external hardware is mounted there)

Solution 3:

The feature you're talking about is NOT supported out of the box.

What you could do though to achieve the very same thing is to use some external utility :

Folder Merge (Free)

Small software utility that will merge folder contents

By Default OSX doesn't merge folder contents so this is a simple GUI tool to do just that.

If simply you want to merge the files located in two separate folders, you can easily do that with Folder Merge.

Unison (Free)

Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Solution 4:

You can also go into the source folder, hit command-a which will select all items in the folder then drag them to the destination folder and drop. You can process the overwrites one at a time by responding to the dialogs or you can tell it to just skip.