question about the "copy, then remove" behaviour of mv

[Musaul Karim]

When you are moving files with mv, the the mv command appears to copy
all the files, then delete the ones at the source. This can be quite
problematic when copying large numbers of files (in my case it was
several thousand files amounting to nearly 200GB) in a quite deep file
structure from one hard drive to another.

What happened was that the target hard drive was connected via USB,
which got disconnected a few hours into the operation, and I had
around 140GB in the target hard drive, but all the files still in the
source hard drive. Needless to say it took me ages verifying what had
copied and what hadn't before continuing the whole move from a GUI.

Is there a way around it to make mv do the "copy, remove" operation
iteratively per file, rather than as a single operation for all the
files?