OSX doesn't merge folders on copy - tips/suggestions?

[mrklaw]

Hi,

 

Trying to copy across a similar folder structure from multiple drives from my Mac mini to my new unRAID setup.

eg: TV/Show/season number/episode.mkv; music/artist/album/track.mp3; photos/person/photos.jpg

 

I have user shares and splits setup and using those to copy across. Now, the first drive copies across just fine. But the second drive runs into problems when there are repeated folders - eg TV/House/Season1 on disk one, and TV/House/Season2 on disk two - it flags up an issue because there is already a folder called 'house' on the share.

 

Common sense would suggest that because season 2 isn't clashing with season 1, it'd just merge the contents and be on its way. But OSX, in its infinite wisdom, considers the folder as a file and only lets me cancel (copying nothing) or replace (which deletes the entire original folder and all its contents)

 

How do I get the contents of the second and third disks onto the NAS? Ideally without resorting to scary terminal commands

[timsutton]

Pick up a copy of Path Finder? Maybe there's a trial version that will do all you need to do.

 

Maybe in 10.8 Apple will finally decide this is a feature worth stealing from Windows 95.

[mrklaw]

pathfinder doesn't seem to do this either - just comes up with the same 'replace?' dialogue and i can't find out enough about its rules to feel safe saying yes to that prompt.

[mcs]

rsync can be used to "merge" folders to provide the result you need.

[prostuff1]

I kind of understand the problem... but I don't get why it seems to be a problem in this case...

 

Just create the folders you needs and copy the files to the correct place... not seeing the huge issue with that.

 

If you don't feel like doing that then perhaps a google search or this app might help.

[mrklaw]

does the command look like this?

 

rsync 'all my TV' !#@##&! 'to my unRAID'

 

Because if not I'm not touching it. (its all double dutch to me, even trying to absorb as much as possible)

 

 

 

prostuff - I suppose partly its convenience. If I do it manually I'll need to drill into each show and copy season folders across. and it'll require hand-holding as each transfer will be fairly short - whereas if I dump the entire TV/movie/music folder level onto the unRAID I can leave it for a few hours to get done. Each folder is a few hundred GB (music not so much but probably a couple hundred folders to manually dig into)

 

 

I'll have a look at chronosync. I use it for backing up stuff and find the options get confusing but it can simulate the transfer which should help.

[prostuff1]

Chronosync would also allow you to do this.

[timsutton]

pathfinder doesn't seem to do this either - just comes up with the same 'replace?' dialogue and i can't find out enough about its rules to feel safe saying yes to that prompt.

 

I'm fairly sure it does. It's one of the features on their website.

 

I've heard ChronoSync works fine for people. I also regularly run an rsync command to shove my photography database to the server, choosing to not preserve permissions in order to cooperate with unRaid's simplified security model. (I'm on 4.7)

 

OS X doesn't "think a folder is a file." All flavors of Unix consider a folder to be a type of file, along with most components of the running OS itself. It would be nice if there was more convenient merging options built into the filesystem commands, but the engineers know better than to make assumptions about how it should work for the user, and rsync already exists.

 

It's also not enough to feel good about how a dialog looks before committing to a mass file merge. You should test first on a small set of data, to confirm that it will do what you expect it to.