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Moving files is such a pain (and risk of losing data) - need help

P

Pakorn

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 7, 2025
11
0
Hi everyone,
I am new to Mac, been on pc for years and love everything is quite perfect, love it. But I have lot of pain because coming from pc word, everything so different, well I am learning.
One thing i am facing that is - i think - a feature that should be native is the move and merge of folders.
I have Folder 1 with 1 movies in my local drive.
I have a folder with 2 other movies in my NAS.
First issue : I found only copy and paste and not cut and paste. This is really painful because suppose I want to move plenty of folders and files, I would have to copy, paste and then remove from source. Which is terrible pain.
Second issue : only native app does the move properly and gives me the option to merge files. For me the native app should just merge the files, makes absolutely no sense to replace the folder and delete the original files on my NAS !
I bought apps such as CommandX and Magic Menu but it is worse than everything because the only option I have is to either replace all folder in my NAS by the folder of my local drive, no option to merge the files in the same folder. Also tried Forklift, same problem.

Let me recap the request below...

Local drive with a folder named Photo Collection - photos 1,2,3...
NAS with a folder named Photo Collection - photos 3,4,.5....

What I want :
move Photo collection to NAS to same name and have photos 1,2,3,4,5,...
Seems quite easy and sorry to say that but Win does it very well, never had any issue with moving files and folders.

What the apps are doing :
- Option 1 : replace folder on NAS by Photo Collection - photos 3,4,5 Definitely NO!!!!!
- Option 2 : cancel
- Option 4 : create a new folder on my NAS with Photo Collection copy - photos 3,4,5..

I mean, that's terrible management of file manipulations and quite basic things you do with a computer, very weird Apple managed it like that.
If anyone could recommend an option please ? I just want to move easily files from local to NAS.

Thanks !
 
Last edited:
To cut and paste on macOS, use Command + C then Command + Option + V.

Or, Command + C then go to destination folder (eg Finder or Desktop), go to menu bar > Edit. Press Option then you’ll see Move command. Use that instead of Paste.
 
With Mac, the mouse is the focus here. You can use modifier keys for COPY and MOVE.

Select what you want to copy or move and then use OPTN with the mouse to COPY and CMD with the mouse to MOVE. Moving is equivalent to cut/paste, only Finder copies first then deletes afterwards.
 
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