Merging files and folders

[eyez73]

Hi all

I'm looking for help for one of my friends who's files and folders and in a bit of a mess.

They currently have lots of files and folders duplicated over Google Drive, OneDrive, locally on their Mac and two USB hard drives.

They want to copy all of them onto a single USB drive before backing them up with both Time Machine and GoogleDrive.

The issue is that there are many duplicate files and folders and they are worried that they may end up losing the newest version of the files if they use the merge option within macOS.

Does anyone have any easy to use applications which will scan the files/folders and only copy the files in the destination if they are newer or not there at all?

 

[Bigwaff]

Does anyone have any easy to use applications which will scan the files/folders and only copy the files in the destination if they are newer or not there at all?

Well, "easy" is subjective... this article covers several utilities

How to speed up your Mac by deleting duplicate files

Looking for a duplicate file finder for your Mac? Here's we'll explain how to find and delete duplicate files using the Finder and other options so you can save space and maybe even speed up your Mac.

www.macworld.com

 

[NoBoMac]

^Ditto the "easy" comment.

Also:

They want to copy all of them onto a single USB drive before backing them up with both Time Machine and GoogleDrive.

Did not dig into this, but this might not be so easy as well. Depending on version of MacOS in use, Google Drive uses MacOS's File Provider API which plants/accesses everything from under ~/Library/CloudStorage (ala newer versions of Dropbox). IIRC.

 

[Fishrrman]

The first thing that should be done is to get the files "out of the cloud" and ONTO the drives.
Even if there are still "two" drives that they are on.

And then...
... sometimes the best way of doing something is still "by hand", a little-at-a-time.

IF they can get everything onto one drive, I WOULD NOT recommend time machine to "dupe" it.
Instead, use either SuperDuper or CarbonCopyCloner.
Either of the above will produce an EXACT COPY of the original.