Skipping .DS_Store files when copying between two external drives There are quite a few questions on .DS_Store files already, but none seem to answer my problem.

I have an external hard drive with a dozen of ~ 50 GB backup folders. When I try to copy these folders to a new external hard drive by drag-and-drop, it fails because


  .DS_Store already exists and could not copied.
  [Stop]


To circumvent this issue, how can I skip copying .DS_Store files when copying between two hard drives?

A Terminal command solution certainly exists, but I am not well-versed enough in cp to find it myself. All help appreciated!

P.S. Both disks are Mac OS X Extended (Journaled).
Try rsync -rv --exclude=.DS_Store &lt;source&gt; &lt;destination&gt; from terminal.

for example

rsync -rv --exclude=.DS_Store ~/Documents /Volumes/Backup/Documents

will do:


(-r) recursive (copy everything below ~/Documents)
(-v) verbose (tell you what it's doing)
(--exclude) excluding any file named .DS_Store
from ~/Documents
to  /Volumes/Backup/Documents


rsync is like a suped up cp command with way more options, most specifically --exclude