In the interest of not losing data, I’ve made various backup folders of data - old Dropbox folders I’ve unlinked, a School folder, etc. I’d like to find a utility to (sensibly) merge those folders into one.
I bought and tried Nektony’s Duplicate File Remover Pro, which has a merge feature. It (we) kind of made a mess of things and I had to roll back using TimeMachine. Its problem was that if a sub-folder had a different file, it treated the whole sub-folder as unique from the folder of the same name that it should have merged into. Thus I wound up with, e.g.
School
Meta
Meta 1
Meta 2
I’m not sure of their reasoning for doing that. I may have misunderstood an option, but don’t think so.
I’m considering using ditto from Terminal, but really hoped for a visual preview before releasing the kraken. Options like “keep newer” or “keep larger” would be nice as well.
When the two School folders were merged, the result would be:
School/Meta
file1
file2
School/Meta 1
file1
file2
file3
Even though file1 and file2 are the same. Because of file3 in the second School/Meta folder, the program treated the second School/Meta as a completely different folder.
This is something you might be able to do with Automator. You can invoke rsynch in Automator, and once you get everything tweaked the way you want you would have a nice little utility that you could fire up at willl with minimal effort.
I use Path Finder from www.cocoatech.com as a finder replacement. It has a feature called FolderSync that will work for what you want to do. It does lots more great stuff as well.
As @WayneG has said, it looks like rsync would work. It has options that would let you traverse subdirectories (or not) and options that will give you a preview of how it would sync folders. There are lots of examples online.
The way I would probably do this would be to copy one of the folders to be merged, then merge the other folder with the new folder. If you don’t like the results, delete the new folder and try again. When you finally have what you want, delete both of the old folders.
You could use rsync … I used it for a year or so before getting Chronosync in 2005 (with all the free upgrades since then - it’s cost me less than US $.01 / day & has been a staple on every Mac I’ve owned).
It’s pretty easy to set up a synchroniser document to accomplish what you’re trying to do here; you can re-use it by switching source and target, or you can set it up for a whole folder tree and selectively sync as much or as little as you want to process at a time. It lets you select by file or by job how to handle matches (keep larger / keep newer etc. as the OP indicates). And it will save you a lot of work over trying to duplicate its functionality. For less than a penny a day (assuming you’re still using it in 2033 – I expect to be).
Beyond Compare is working well for me, and has helped me undo the insanity that was Duplicate File Remover Pro’s idea of merging folders. It’s also helping me consolidate all my “just in case” copies that I have strewn here and there.
Registered, got an educational discount – win-win all around.
Thanks @anon41602260!
Glad it worked well for you. BC recently let me step up from my OS X version that I purchased 4 years ago, to the multi-platform version (OS X + Windows + Linux) and gave me a 100% credit for what I paid for the OS X version. Excellent value. Besides, what’s not to like about software made in Madison WI
(assuming you’re still using it in 2033 – I expect to be).