Copying contents between hard drives with the same folder names erases data

I have Final Cut Pro assets stored in two hard drives. I was attempting to consolidate them into a single directory on one of the two hard drives. I did this by dragging and dropping the contents of one folder into the equivalent folder on the destination hard drive, meaning that several folder names were shared between the two directories.
In Windows, the only contents that would be overwritten are files and folders who share the exact same relative name during the copy procedure. However, OS X appears to have erased the entire contents of the destination folder in favor of the contents of the source folder.
Time Machine is not enabled: Not enough hard drive space to store everything twice.
Is this by design? Am I missing something? Is my data recoverable by means that would not cost me several hundreds of dollars? On a scale of 1 to screwed, am I screwed?
Message was edited by: NuclearBastard

Seems like you did not select the content but the folder itself. Let's say you're copying from folder A to B. To only overwrite stuff in folder B with the same name while keeping other files & folders, you need to go inside folder A and select the content. If you do select folder A itself, it will completely replace folder B. This is normal behaviour and I'm sure it's the same with other operating systems like Windows.
This behaviour, of course, applies also to any subfolders within A & B, so you can't just use the Finder for such a +merge operation+. I'm not 100% sure, but since you were overwriting a lot of stuff, I'd say you're screwed and your data is gone, sorry.
To avoid things like that in the future, you might want to use software which has the ability to synchronize file structures. In Terminal you can use ditto for that, but there are several GUI apps out there, too. Just search http://www.versiontracker.com for merge or synchronize and you should find something.
Björn

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