Hazel ‘Copy’ Action Doesn’t Register New or Renamed Files

Hi everyone,

I’d like to flag a potential issue I’ve noticed while using Hazel’s Copy action in a folder with nested subfolders.

What I observe:

My Hazel rule is configured to use Copy with the following settings:

Target: a nested folder structure under a main directory (e.g., Books → Book1 → Chapter X)

Condition: “Any File”

Options: “Do not copy if duplicate,” and “Copy folder structure: from monitored folder”

On first execution, everything copies correctly.

However, if I then add a new file (e.g., Chapter 25) or rename an existing file (e.g., to Chapter 1 – version 2), Hazel fails to copy it again. The log shows:

“Book1 is a dupe of file at destination and is not being copied”

I’ve discovered that switching to Sync does resolve this, but I don’t want files deleted from the destination if they disappear from the source.

My desired behavior is:

Source additions → copy to destination

Source modifications/renames → reflect as new files in destination

Source deletions → do not affect files already in destination

Is this expected behavior for the Copy action? If so, could there be an enhancement to add support for detecting new or renamed files without deleting elsewhere? Or is there a workaround to better suit this workflow?

Any help or insight would be much appreciated—thanks!

You are matching folders and copying them wholesale. Fine if you only want to do it once. If you want it to do it for any changes, you need to add conditions to match if anything changes.

Have a rule set up to match the individual files, not the whole top level folder. You'll need conditions to check if anything was added or changed (date added and/or date modified is after date last matched). Then you'll need a separate rule to tell Hazel to go into subfolders so that it can reach those files in the first place. Check the manual on subfolders.

I suggest trying it on a test set of folders/files as subfolder stuff can go wrong if not set up correctly.