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Forum Discussion
Dropbox still opens files in ignored folders
I have a folder inside Dropbox that I'm trying to use for some hobby C++ development using MS Visual Studio
I followed the process to have Dropbox ignore the temporary build folders (like /x64 and /.vs)
In Dropbox I can see that this did indeed stop Dropbox from syncing any of the files in those ignored folders
However, using Process Monitor, I can still observe that Dropbox opens files inside those folders and queries various bits of information about them
I do notice that it opens these files with permissive 'share modes' that allow other processes to 'read / write / delete', however this still causes problems with Visual Studio's build tools, because THOSE tools do not open some of these build files with permissive share modes - they specify NO sharing, which causes them to be unable to open those files, and builds sporadically fail.
I would love to use Dropbox as a simple shared folder like this, however it doesn't seem workable in this situation without dropbox promising to not open files that it knows are in ignored folders.
- Jay
Dropbox Staff
Hi mnicolella, thanks for bringing this to our attention.
If the folder is ignored, then files won't sync to the Dropbox site, as you've noted.
However, since the folder is still in the Dropbox folder, the app itself will still try to access it in general, even though no files are synced.
If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.
Thank you for the reply. Is it not possible to have Dropbox check whether a file should be ignored or not, before it tries to open it and query information about it? Or, could there be a way to set a delay for inspecting changed files? If I could tell Dropbox "sure, build a list of files you want to go inspect, but don't actually touch them until 10 seconds later", that would also mitigate this race condition between dropbox and other tools generating these files.
- Jay
Currently, there isn't any feature like that available at this time, only the previous information regarding ignoring files and folders.
