Hi @<1545216070686609408:profile|EnthusiasticCow4> ! I have an idea.
The flow would be like this: you create a dataset, the parent of that dataset would be the previously created dataset. The version will auto-bump. Then, you sync this dataset with the folder. Note that sync will return the number of added/modified/removed files. If all of these are 0, then you use Dataset.delete on this dataset and break/continue, else you upload and finalize the dataset.

Something like:

parent = Dataset.get(dataset_name="[LTV] Dataset")
dataset = Dataset.create(..., parents=[parent.id])
synced = dataset.sync_folder(local_path=folder)
if not any(synced):
  Dataset.delete(dataset.id)
  return
dataset.connect/add_tags/upload()
dataset.finalize()