Merge Files

Hello,

I am trying to find a way to 'merge' files, but have not succeeded.

I need this to backup all of my music onto an external hard drive, which I have done in the past on a windows PC, which when there are two of one file a box pops up with: "Replace, Merge or Cancel".

I have seen some comments about a filemerge command but have not being able to get this to work, I don't know if this is just for older operating systems.

Thanks

Merge programs only make sense for text files, and Kaleidoscope — File comparison for Mac also allows you to compare images, which is pretty cool..

But when it comes to music and other binary files, there is no merge involved here, so filemerge won't help you.

If you want to backup music to external HDD, just make sure that your source directories are named uniquely and you should be able to drag and drop the whole bunch to the external HDD..

Raz0rEdge thank you for your reply.

I don't think I explained myself very well. I shall try to explain in more detail.

Files on mac:
Folder A: song1.mp3, song2.mp3 & song4.mp3

Files on external hdd:
Folder A: song2.mp3, song3.mp3 & song4.mp3

If you imagine this on a much larger scale, so I have lots of bands with some albums backed up and other albums not. It would take a long time to go through and transfer the files manually.

I hope this explains my situation better.

Yeah, that's better. What you want to do is merge folders, but your title says files.

What is your current Mac OS?

Sorry again for the confusion.

The version I'm using is 10.6.8.

AHh OK..so since song1m.mp3 is missing from the external HD, but available on your Mac, you want to copy the folder so that you end up with song1/2/3/4.mp3 on the external HD.

Gotcha..be careful though that since you have Folder A on your Mac and Folder A on your external HD, copying the folder from the Mac to the external HD will overwrite the contents of the external HD and as such result in you losing song3.mp3 and so on..

You might want to explore some alternatives to Finder to accomplish this..

Thanks again.

Do you have suggestions to any alternatives?

Lion (10.7.x) does folder merge doesn't it? Please don't make me look through my back issues of Macworld to find that!

I haven't downloaded Lion yet, but I have just looked through the features and a folder merge is available.

I guess I will download Lion.

Thank you both for your help.