Total Commander

In copy mode (F5) you have dialogue options such as:
- ...
- Only older files
-...

If I want to restore a folder that contains a few changed files but there are somewhere down in the dungeon of 5000 files and a wild folder structure, it would makes sense to me to have the additional option to overwrite only LATER/more recent, newer files by the old pones from the source.

Otherwise I unnecessarily need to overwrite potentially unchanged files, creating more activity than needed.

Please...?

If just want to restore a folder that contains a few changed files,

Currently, try to use Synchronize directories(cm_FileSync) may be workaround.
You can disable to show the equal files, to prevent overwrite potentially unchanged files.

Thanks for the reply Kyles, yes, I am aware of sync and use it quite heavily, but in a folder structure that huge as I was working on, the sync takes hundred years, plus-minus a few days, so it would be faster (set-and-forget) by a quick copy-and-overwrite with suggested flag.

Shonu wrote:Thanks for the reply Kyles, yes, I am aware of sync and use it quite heavily, but in a folder structure that huge as I was working on, the sync takes hundred years, plus-minus a few days, so it would be faster (set-and-forget) by a quick copy-and-overwrite with suggested flag.

Yes, add some Date or Size options in copy/move dialogue will be more convenient...

BTW, I had tested Sync dirs. for one directory of my external HDD, contains a lot of files, total around 1.5TB in 800000+ files, in 50000+ subdirectories.
It just take about 6~7 minutes for reading directories and comparison.
Because I had unchecked the "by content" option.

I need such a feature, too.
I often copy files to a network folder on another PC. In case of an incoplete copy operation the file will remain in the network folder with the current date/time which is always newer than the original. So on the next try I only need to overwrite those files.

Kyles wrote: ..
BTW, I had tested Sync dirs. for one directory of my external HDD, contains a lot of files, total around 1.5TB in 800000+ files, in 50000+ subdirectories.
It just take about 6~7 minutes for reading directories and comparison.
Because I had unchecked the "by content" option.

I am already impatient after 10 seconds, thing si I don't need to compare in advance. I know exactly what I want to achieve in such an operation:
"Copy again from a (baseline) source but only overwriting the Changed files"
so I get the state of a previous cloning operation. Identical to overwrite older files, I need the opposite to avoid big traffic and unnecessary writes

Well, let's hope this will be added (I better check 8.51a - maybe it is there )