I just received the notice of “Under Review” consideration. I can’t tell you how excited I am by this step forward. I had abandoned consideration of Pathfinder due to the lack of this feature. Even now, most of my file activities are done on the command line for fear of the terrible damage that Finder (or Pathfinder) can do with its default behavior. I am still stunned that people don’t scream from the highest mountain tops when they either a) lose tons of data (in my case my entire CD collection, thank goodness for backups), or b) realize they have to hand merge a giant directory tree folder by folder to avoid destroying all of their files, or c) lose data because they missed one or two folders when doing (b). The compromises and effort required to resort to manual or commandline processes to do the most basic of directory maintenance still confounds me. I can’t even remember the last time I used Finder to copy more than 1 or 2 files due to its terrible handling. Thanks goodness for shell commands. I will say that 99%, no 100% of my file copying is going to be non-destructive Merge (with optional replace prompt for all or singly), so making this option as easy to get to as possible or even default through a configuration option would be wonderful. You can have all of my remaining votes to encourage this issue as its the Achilles heel of not just Pathfinder, but all of the Mac default behavior file managers.

Note: just to clarify for those that will nitpick… the /music/newmusicfiles.mp3 is assuming your copying a complex directory structure /music/{variousnewartistfolders}/{variousnewartistalbums}/{songs} by copy just the root /music folder and assuming the computer will do the hard work.

The software should always err on the side of not destroying data when intention is not clear. In the modern work flow, merging is many times more likely to be the desired behavior, particularly with the volume of photos, music, movies, documents, spread across 500GB multi level drives. Copy /music/newmusicfiles.mp3 to /music and congrats, your entire collection is gone. Alternatives…unix.