Your workflow is unique 👨‍💻 -  tell us how you use Dropbox here.

Tom_M's avatar
Tom_M
Helpful | Level 6
11 years ago
Status:
Delivered

Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

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.

👉 Learn more and sign up here

desktop
sync

1,036 Comments

Show More
  • wwwiz's avatar
    wwwiz
    Helpful | Level 6
    8 years ago

    I'm all for the benefits .gitignore if you are using Git (which ignores folders by default) but I don't see how that would be a useful feature for the general Dropbox user base. 

     

    If there was an invisible .dropboxignore folder that ignored all photoshop files (*.psd) in all folders that would cause many support tickets from users looking for folders or files that forgot they ignored globally.

     

    Maybe if it was an online-only setting that you could hide on a per folder/file basis using the contextual menu (menu > hide). But that would probably include adding a 'show hidden files' option online (next to show deleted) as well as a Account/Selective Sync (show hidden files) desktop option. 

    Not sure there is enough benefit for that type of change.

  • bilal's avatar
    bilal
    New member | Level 2
    8 years ago

    I'm constanly in need of changing my development environment, and I love using dropbox because other than using github its more up to date and it also contains my IDE preferences, sometimes I get bored from desktop and take my laptop and continue from there thanks to Dropbox, but recently I built a new machine and installed a fresh dropbox, selected only development folder with few projects to sync, but because of node_modules folders its around 200.000 files and it will take forever to download, its not about the size of the files, its the amount that makes it harder to sync, and I dont even need those files.. files I need are maximum 100.

    There are also other scenarios like the need of to not sync ._* files generated by osx etc.

     

    It might not be profitable for you to make developers your users, and making this update may interest developers more, but we are your user anyway, so with optimizations like these you can save from a lot of http requests and storage space, we generally use little space but with tons of little files.

    Thanks

  • Musiclee's avatar
    Musiclee
    Helpful | Level 6
    8 years ago

    That's asking for too much.   Lol

     

    I used filesanywhere which had this

     

    i need to ignore all folders with the name

     

    AUDIO

    VIDEO

     

    i guess that will never be possible

     

    better yet.   Let me schedule the sync of these folders when I CHOOSE 

    at night while I am sleeping!!!!