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Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a g...
It's crazy that this issue with 26K Views 550 Comments 735 Votes has no definitive answer or solution after 2 years, 6 months, 9 days!! Should we assume that after 1,000 days at the top post - that this just isn't a priority for Dropbox? Even if the answer is "no" from Dropbox it would be nice to have them take a position. Otherwise, this just serves as a 2 1/2 year venting session which doesn't help anybody.
Let's try and think through why this isn't a feature on Dropbox.com. I assume it has to do with performance :white_check_mark:.
Probably the same reason the 2nd most popular post (calculating folder sizes) also isn't resolved. If you have ever tried to calculate folder sizes using Dropbox desktop (macos > list view > finder > show view options >[x] calculate all sizes) you know it takes processor time if the folders are large - and these are local computer files. I can't imagine what that would take on dropbox.com to count and calculate constantly.
Maybe adding patterns (like .gitignore) to dropbox.com would just slow it down too much. You might remember back before smart sync when it could take days to sync new users if you had 100's of GB's of files. Dropbox had the brilliant idea of 'hey lets just index the folder names and files instead" and now there isn't really a syncing lag issue (at least with me anyway). So why can't they just add a .gitignore to the selective sync indexing?
I don't know but let's guess some reasons to why having a dropbox.com/share/ignore page isn't happening:
Possible Answers...?
1. It will slow down dropbox.com because it doesn't have to check which files are being uploaded it just has to check where they are uploaded. It only checks file extensions when you try to preview I prob.
2. That is a development feature (most personal/biz users don't sync node_modules) and so we will add it dropbox for linux. So on linux desktop instead of excluding a directory like this for every project:
dropbox exclude add ~/Dropbox/Project/node_modules
You can add a wildcard to the dropbox like:
dropbox exclude add node_modules/
3. It will break Extended Version History & Comments feature because how will users be able to restore files that were .ignored after then were added? How do we notify people that have commented on a now-.ignored file or folder?
4. Do it with the API using selective sync. Dropbox only syncs selected files so just programmatically uncheck any project with node_modules/ folder via the API. As soon as we get to that feature.
I can't think of any other possible issues with implementing .gitignore. I'm sure there must be some very good reasons for Dropbox not doing this, I just wish I knew what they were.