finder copying files problem or limitation

[mrweirdo]

Is it just me being new to macs that I have this problem or is it actualy a limitation of finder itself on osx? I have noticed that if u want to copy a folder of data which has files in it that you allready have made a copy of you have to tell finder to replace all the files.

For example I'll have like my documents folder then i add a large amounte of new files to it then want to back it up to a folder on a server over my lan. Instead of just being copy it to my server were it just automaticly adds the new stuff to the server I have to hit replace when i copy the documents folder over then it replaces all the files and takes quite a long time when your dealing with about 10gb of data or more even on a gigabit lan or a local drive. Now coming from windows I know it would just copy all the new files over and not take so long because its not recopying everything over again.

 

[mad jew]

Yeah, Finder doesn't have an inbuilt merge feature.

 

[cwedl]

something for lepoard. i'll give mac osx a point back:

if you are downloading a file it can be moved anywhere in the operating system and it can still be downloaded.

 

[gnasher729]

Yeah, Finder doesn't have an inbuilt merge feature.

Something simpler would be fine in many cases: If an existing file is found, check if both files are identical, and do nothing in that case.

 

[mrweirdo]

bummer so while we wait for leopard are there any alternatives to finder that can do that in the meantime?

 

[mad jew]

Well, Terminal can do it but it's not really the most user-friendly option. Type man cp into an open Terminal window (it's in the Utilities folder) for more information.

Alternatively, there's an app named FileMerge in the OSX Developer Tools (should be on one of the install discs that came with the Mac, but wasn't installed by default) that can apparently merge folders too.

I haven't tried either so I'm not sure which option is the best for you.

 

[cwedl]

I think you could use this from apples website it looks to have filemerge in it as well, saves you having to go through the install discs!

 

[mrweirdo]

hrm ya i just got that idea to use the terminal acutaly since suposedly cp can do merge

so I'm now writing a simple little bash script to make a copy of my documents folder on my samba server. I'm hoping i can eather run the script in automator or have it run via cron. I'll post in a bit for anyone that might be interested.

 

[mrweirdo]

hrm after looking at cp man pages it looks like the version on osx doesnt seem to support it eather

but I did come up with anouther solution and that was using tar. here is my example:

#!/bin/bash

mkdir /Volumes/backup
mount_smbfs //sambaserver/backup /Volumes/backup/
# copies the data over to the backup server and archives it
tar -uvf /Volumes/backup/data.tar /Users/username/Documents
umount /Volumes/backup
rmdir /Volumes/backup