Uh, one shouldn't have to learn Unix and drop to the terminal just to conduct some basic COPY and PASTE functions.
Seriously. Even Windows can merge folders with a simple copy.. there's no reason OSX can't do this in the UI.
When a large multi-folder copy fails partway through, there's NO way to resume it easily, it's a nightmare of combing through folders until you find exactly where the copy petered out and a lot of manual copy/paste from there.
I'm astonished that such a polished OS is lacking in this area. Come on Apple, fix this! In the meantime, does anyone know a GUI utility that handles copy/paste better?
You may have a point, but the user you are replying to did give some suggestiong so for a GUI to accomplish the same task.
Carbon Copy Cloner will do a block level copy from one drive to another, and you can select to only copy certain folders in an incremental method.
It's really more for cloning and backing up your important data to a second drive, but It could work for many of you.
And you don't really need to know unix to do a copy in a terminal.
Opent the terminal, then type
cp <path to file/filename.extension> <path to new location/>
example
cp ./Documents/taxes.xls /Volumes/BUDrive/2009TaxInfo/
This will copy the file taxes.xls from my home folder which is where I'm at when I first open terminal...to the External drive 'BUDrive' and place it in the folder on that drive called '2009TaxInfo'.
the './' signifies 'starting in my present location'
To copy folders and their contents and ignore errors try this....
cp -rf <path to folder to be copied> <path to folder copying to> 2>/dev/null
cp - copy command
-rf - r is recursive (copy everything in the folder(s), f force the copy even if the destination file exists.
2>/dev/null - should tell the system that if there are any errors to send the sterr messages to /dev/null (a bit bucket in linux), kind of like telling it to ignore the errors and keep going.
I haven't tried this on Mac so be patient and let me know if you need more help.
Brian