Your workflow is unique 👨💻 - tell us how you use Dropbox here.
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 good explanation of why it's not there. A quick google search reveals loads of people also looking for the same feature. I really like the workflow I have with dropbox, but it's getting to the point where I might switch providers in order to allow better selective sync.
I've seen hackish solutions using selective sync, but it would be great if this could be done in one of the following ways:
- global pattern matching eg "node_modules"
- a marker file in the directory like .dropboxignore
- a simple right click context menu "Ignore this folder"
Other than that, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Tom
Idea Status Update
We're launching a closed beta for Ignore Files feature, and we’d love your help testing it out.
1,036 Comments
Upvoted.
Thanks for the trick, but this should REALLY be a dropbox feature.
Oh and if you ever get StefanoBox up and running, sign me up!
@Stefano Valicchia s. "You must be as blind as a blinded mole (or you must pretend very hardly to be so) to ignore it for 2 years"
Absolutely true (and hilarious). And just in case the Dropbox team managed to miss this thread, there are a few other I am aware of, maybe more.
Selective Sync suggestion - way to uncheck all folders
Why won't Dropbox add a .gitignore like feature?
Selective sync automatically syncs new folders
Stop auto-inheriting new folders when using selective sync
Automatic adding of new folders when selective sync is enabled
Just don't post anything to get yourself banned, that wouldn't be any fun :) Personally, I think someone at Dropbox does read all this, it's just that the company doesn't care. It would be great if they could claim ignorance, but every single one of these threads has at least one Dropbox response....
This is by far the most "upvoted" thread (444 ups and counting with 387 replies).
It's on top of Dropbox forum page. You must be as blind as a blinded mole (or you must pretend very hardly to be so) to ignore it for 2 years.
I think Dropbox isn't monitoring the forum at all. Let's use some four letter words to evocate at least a Moderator (or some sulfur and a pentagram...)
Simon, the Dropbox team does not consider +1's: you need to upvote the thread in order to be heard :-)
+1
How many +1's does this need before it's considered? I have been looking for a solution to this for months.
Dropbox is a brilliant tool but this is a major drawback for me. Hopefully a competitor will arrive soon with a solution.
I wonder how much wasted space there is on Dropbox servers. Most of my node_modules folders are way over 200MB
@Ettore P. Great name! Catching!
I know it would be time consuming, and it's not something a single developer can do in his spare time. I could manage to wrap up something for the server side, and, using Node, for the client time. But it would require at leas some iOS, Swift, .NET and C developer to create native versions of the clients (Node has some memory leaks when watching many folders/files, so I think it can't be the optimal way)
By the way, my heart would be content to have .dropboxignore and nothing else, as it would clean out the major issue I ran into using Dropbox for work.
Actually there were some open source projects for this issue (like this https://github.com/doomrobo/DropboxIgnore) and another one I can't find anymore but aren't working as Dropbox closed a lot of their "local engine api" for security concerns.
It would be great to be able do even a little tool like this.
I'm looking for the @Adam and @Jordan suggestions.
Again: contacting support is not working. If you scroll some pages up this thread you'll read some Dropbox dev response. Those are all the same tone: we are reading this, we are not doing this because you are a little niche of customers but we can't say you it clearly for fear of losing you all now. So hang on another year or two. Bye.
What they maybe are not keeping in mind is that probably our companies were suggested using Dropbox from "nerds" like us that used it before. This is what happened here in my company holding. So now they have a 150+ Business Account active because a nerdy developer took a peak to an obscure startup that simplified his living and talked about it to his boss... and so on.
@Adam
pCloud looks like it's going to work for me. It has most of the Dropbox features I care about, it's cheaper, plus I can sync more than one folder.
The only issue I see so far is that it doesn't have selective sync, but the way I have my Dropbox organized, I should just be able to treat each top-level folder in my Dropbox as its own pCloud sync folder. This will give me a viable selective-sync-like experience.
Thanks for the tip.
@Jordan,
I use Arq more as a versioned backup tool, with a single computer. Retrieval from Glacier is expensive, so this is the downside.
