Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

Any news on this being implemented? Also looking for a ".gitignore" style solution.

Justin from Just Front-end 

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The main issue I see, is that you’d be giving up the ability to actually have a folder named “node_modules”, that actually can be synced.

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With regex you can be fairly explicit as to what you want to include and exclude. I don't see this as a major issue.

The point is a ".gitignore" style solution is not rocket science and I think at this point we are just generally disappointed in the lack of action/urgency from the dropbox business. Many technical users like me have moved on to alternatives. Right now I'm only still on this discussion to see if and when dropbox will ever listen to their community of users. It makes for a great case study.

Razvan Boxifier 

Here’s some thoughts.

The whole file/folder pattern based approach has merit, but in my opinion, I see some tradeoffs with this approach. The main issue I see, is that you’d be giving up the ability to actually have a folder named “node_modules”, that actually can be synced.

You should be able to have a folder named “node_modules”, have it be located anywhere within your projects or anywhere in Dropbox, have it be for actual real node modules, or have it be just some random folder, that happens to be named node_modules, even if, as bad of an idea that it is, you should be able to do this. You should be able to selectively decide what gets synced and what stays local only.

My idea, essentially, is just an enhancement to the mechanisms that we’re already working with, ie. the ADS.

Here’s my idea, at least for Windows:

• Any file/folder, anywhere, can be set to be local-only via a right click action. We’re simply giving a GUI experience for running the ADS on the file/folder.
  
• Upon setting the ADS on a file/folder, we update the file/folders icon in File Explorer.

And that’s it.

It’s worth mentioning also, as it is right now via ADS, if a file/folder is local-only, if it’s deleted, then recreated, it does NOT automatically get set as local only. This makes sense. (Highlighting how this would be different with pattern based rules.)

Also, here’s a few things I recently stumbled upon, that might help or spark ideas from the community:

• From what I understand, I think this is an approach to setting your node_modules to a location outside of your project, ie. a global place:
  https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v8/commands/npm-prefix
• Here’s a client to see ADS’s (Update: I'm actually not sure what this streams thing is. Couldn't get it to work on Windows 11. Don't think it was what I thought it was.)
  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/streams

And last, if you or anyone is interested in collaborating on the development of this, here’s a repo I just made on Github. Connect with me if you wanted to contribute.

https://github.com/justfront-end/DB-Local-Only

DelugeIA- don't hold your breath 🙂

This feature appears to have completely beaten the dropbox techies.

This is currently the TOP VOTED IDEA and it is now over EIGHT YEARS OLD.

The Dropbox Development Team must be familiar with git, .gitignore, robots.txt, .htaccess, Mod_Rewrite, and a hundred other things that use regex and pattern matching to accomplish this task. It surely cannot be as complicated as examining NTFS's ADS tags.

It seems that a minimum solution would to be able to add an option to Right Click > Dropbox > Ignore this File/Folder. But having to do that over and over seems almost as tedious as running a Powershell command.

And for us nerds, being able to add an entry to dropbox.ini or somewhere to ignore all XYZ named folders within an ABC path.

Ignore_Matching %Dropbox%\Projects\**\.vscode

Ignore_Matching %Dropbox%\Projects\**\.pio

Ignore_Matching %Dropbox%\Testing\**\nightly-builds\*.zip

Ignore_Matching %Dropbox%\National\Archives\Mar-a-Lago\Classified\*.pdf

Thank ya! 🙂

sebastian_  wrote:

 

Will this work when set on a root directory so that ALL `node_modules` sub-directories ever created now, or in the future, deleted, and re-created over time will be ignored and not synced without further user action? Each of these `node_module` cache folders contain hundreds of thousands of files each and undergo regular refreshes. It's absolutely critical that Dropbox NOT process/traverse these sub-directories whatsoever.

 

If `com.dropbox.ignore` can be set at the Dropbox/ root, will you explain the exact steps for macOS? It will be such a life saver

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Unfortunately, setting 'com.dropbox.ignore' at the Dropbox/root would not achieve the desired effect, because that would mean asking Dropbox to ignore the entire contents of the Dropbox folder. That is due to the way the 'com.dropbox.ignore' feature is currently implemented in the Dropbox desktop client. For now it is only possible to ignore existing folders by marking them individually with 'com.dropbox.ignore'.

What you described makes perfect sense and I am thinking of another way to achieve that. I will write back here if I find something worth mentioning.

Same here! In Dev-Environment there are a lot of Temp, cached, whatever files you don't want to sync. A way to exclude those files/folders via patterns would be very helpful. 

@Dropbox-Team / @Emma: Don't forget!!!! - Developers are very often a multiplicator for other customers...

[Update]

OMG - I just saw in one of the other comments that there is already a .dbxignore-File for Backups!!! 
Please! give us this feature for Sync. This would be a massive argument for DropBox.

Another argument: Sometimes you have very critical files on your machine like certificates or password-Files.
You don't want them synced to Dropbox or to another machine.

I actively use dropbox to manage all my client projects. In addition to sorting all my client/project assets, each one has at least two github repository nested within. I did this because its an amazing user experience to have all my files, environment variables, and graphic assets sync seamlessly between 6 different workstations. The single bane of my existence is the node_modules folder. Any time I create a new project or start adding more dependencies to an exciting one - dropbox takes an eternity to sync do to this folder. Having to manually deselect every singe node_modules folder just isn't a sustainable approach. I think Dropbox could benefit from creating a .gitignore equivalent so I can remove certain folders or file types globally from the system. 

Hi Razvan Boxifier, Thank you for the explanation.

Will this work when set on a root directory so that ALL `node_modules` sub-directories ever created now, or in the future, deleted, and re-created over time will be ignored and not synced without further user action? Each of these `node_module` cache folders contain hundreds of thousands of files each and undergo regular refreshes. It's absolutely critical that Dropbox NOT process/traverse these sub-directories whatsoever.

If `com.dropbox.ignore` can be set at the Dropbox/ root, will you explain the exact steps for macOS? It will be such a life saver.

Razvan Boxifier - Thank you so much!

What a great explanation. Much appreciated.