Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

MeganCan you please provide evidence of your statement? If not, please change the status back.

I beg everyone to report Megan 's change of status to get this unmarked as "Delivered"

Megan I'm absolutely livid that you want to gaslight us to tell us this is delivered. Not only does the proposed solution NOT EVEN PREVENT LOCKING AND SCANNING OF IGNORED FILES/FOLDERS (causing tons of errors), it's nowhere near sufficient to our requests. WE HAVE BEEN SCREAMING THIS FOR YEARS AND DESPITE BS RESPONSES AND PROMISES, WE HAVE BEEN DELIVERED NO USABLE SOLUTION. 

This extremely important feature request has been a major inconvenience for a sizable portion of your community for nearly a decade and have been given nothing but insufficient responses despite detailed explanation as to why the proposed solution is not sufficient. This is a DAILY issue for me and it's extremely frustrating how you have ignored all the comments clearly stating how the solution is not sufficient FOR YEARS!!!!! 

If I try to compile a Visual Studio project in dropbox without disabling sync (even with the "obj" folder ignored), files still get locked, causing compilation errors every single time. I primarily use Dropbox to keep an active backup of my coding projects. 

No, this has NOT been delivered. The proposed solution is not what we are asking for. 

First of all, it isn't cross-platform.

Second, you have to specify it on every machine you synchronize to. 

Third, and most importantly, the information on what folders should be ignored disappears if the folder is deleted. Many tools create folders on the fly, eg node_modules, and just recreate them if they have been deleted. 

Fourth, there are concurrency issues. Computer a creates node_modules and starts to synchronize it. You ignore it and it is deleted from the cloud. Computer B now creates node_modules and synchronizes it. What is computer A now supposed to do with the new cloud folder that it ignoes?

Just implement a .gitignore style. It is not that difficult. koofr has it, and it works flawlessly.

MaksMaks991- I completely forgot about this thread as I haven't been active on Dropbox for some time now - but I got the notification of a new post, and yes - you are absolutely right: 3 years with no movement on this idea is just unacceptable.

It is the most asked for feature by a really large margin and it has been for years. I have long since moved on and I have not looked back.

There are a number of really great alternatives that all have this requested feature.

Status changed to: Accepted
11-26-2019 02:52 AM

Are you seriously? Almost three years to complete the feature? Oh wait, it's not completed yet. I can't understand how it's possible. Looks like you're just ignoring your users voices. This feature is pretty simple – it's like .gitignore file in Git.

I see the only reason – with this feature implemented users will be able to free their spaces from garbage and there will not be a reason for them to switch to more expensive plan to have more space. I understand you in some way, it's just a business.

And it's pretty sad because I love Dropbox. I'm your user for almost 10 years, and I have paid plan. But now I see that your Ideas portal is illusion of users can affect the product. This idea is top voted and there is no movement on it for three years. You just don't respect our voices. Yes, you have the name and long history. But please take a look at your competitors, research best features there, be better.

I just switched to MEGA, because of Dropbox lacking this requested feature

> This idea is going to need a bit more support before we share your suggestion with our team. 

I would like to emphasize that the idea has received enough votes (see the linked ignore folder post above), but Dropbox hasn't implemented it fully. Dropbox's solution of ignoring a specific folder doesn't scale when you have lots of files across multiple machines. There's no substitute for a .dropboxignore or custom filter lists available in other cloud services.

Unfortunately, no one is finding this particular issue when they are searching, which explains the low number of votes.

Please pass this on to the development team. Other cloud services are implementing user-specified ignore filter lists — Dropbox hasn't. It's a big selling point amongst technical cloud services, of which Dropbox is still the most reliable. This feature is a must-have for professional users.

There needs to be a way to specify ignore folders/files that are software generated, intended to be temporary and local to a specific machine. For instance Microsoft Visual Studio generates a /bin and /obj upon building code, which a developer could do a hundred a times a day. Each time the software deletes the folder and recreates it. Which now you have to close dropbox because it dropbox locks up the folder and Visual Studio fails to build then.  You current process of ignoring a folder is also flawed in another way because it doesn't persist when the temporary folder might be automatically deleted by a program. Maybe borrowing a page from the .git code repository world, a simple solution would be too look for a file named .dropbox_ignore.txt with specified relative paths to ignore like /bin /node_modules /obj.