The Mac Finder "Keep Both" dialog

If you select a bunch of files to copy to a different folder, and that folder already has a copy of a file with that same name, the Mac Finder presents a dialog which is nearly but also frustratingly incomplete.  The one possibility that is most likely to be useful is the one possibility that is missing.

The choices presented are:

Keep Both

Stop

Replace

A checkbox also allows you to Apply to All.

Even presuming the name of the file to be the only information that this dialog is based upon (I've talked about that before; ideally the system would compare the content and metadata and let you know if and how they are dissimilar) this is a useless set of choices.  For now I'll assume there is only one file with a particular name.

Generally what you'd want to do when consolidating a set of files would be to skip all the duplicated files, and just copy all the new ones.  Skip is not an option in the Finder dialog.  The Stop option simply drops out of the whole operation.  No further files are copied or even tested.  The Stop option is a panic escape, not something you'd want to rely on for getting work done.  If you knew you were going to be using the Stop option, you wouldn't have bothered to do the operation in the first place.

So in fact you are given no option that would be helpful in consolidating files.  You can perform the Replace option, but that wasteful of system resources including the immediate cost in uselessly replacing one identical file with another, and potentially requiring both copies of an identical file in the backup system.  (I have observed that the Mac's convenient Time Machine will under many circumstances enlarge from multiple copies of the same file.  This seems notably true when the identical files are found on different devices.)  As my stuff has grown, I'm more and more concerned about the size I need for my Backup Device which ultimately becomes the limiting factor when additional harddrives are used.

Now if it was being really nice, the system could actually test the contents of files, and not even bother warning you about identical files (instead just skipping them) and giving you the dialog only when files actually differ, and telling you the size and date information.

Anyway, the lack of basic support for what you'd want to do in maintaining a collection of files fits my conspiracy theory of commercial computer system vendors.  Their aim is not so much to assist in these tasks, but dissuade you from doing them, and instead relying more and more upon online sources of entertainment and edification instead (which will come along with the advertising and mind control, including the mind control to buy more stuff and especially buy more computer stuff).

It may be worth noting that the all the possibly defaults are available in Terminal whose shell was cloned by GNU and inspired by Unix which was designed in the 1970's to actually get stuff done, such as managing a collection of files, and not so much primarily being a vehicle for mind control.