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
+1
I dont want to leave dropbox. Really like it. But as the amount of "thrash" grows, dropbox is getting very slow. We need a way to keep generic and redownload-able stuff like ./node_modules out of dropbox.
+1 .dropboxignore is a good idea
+1
I am also close to switching to another service. Really likes dropbox - but the enourmous amont of thrash that is constantly syncing is driving me mad. And no - the selective sync is not a real alternative to an ignorefile.According to Microsofts OneDrive uservoice
https://onedrive.uservoice.com/forums/262982-onedrive/suggestions/8888062-onedrive-files-on-demand
We need 26K of votes and 2 years
So may be at least vote up for this one:
JFYI
+1
There are many scenarios in which an application adds little hidden files to a folder, which should be considered local metadata and not synced to other computers.
For example:
- folder thumbnail database (added by some file managers)
- folder view settings file (added by some file managers)
- lock files (temporarily added by some software like RStudio)
- ...
Instead of providing a general solution to this problem, Dropbox currently hard-codes a small selection of such filenames to exclude from syncing:
- desktop.ini
- thumbs.db
- .ds_store
- icon\r
- .dropbox
- .dropbox.attr
This covers the metadata files added by the default file managers on Windows and Mac and by Dropbox itself, but not those added by other kinds of programs like RStudio and by third-party or Linux file managers.
Please provide a more general solution!
Other file syncing software has supported this for ages: For example, git allows users to specify a custom list of filenames to exclude in .gitignore.
If adding such a feature to the Dropbox UI is too much work, then make it so that we e.g. manually have to edit the .dropbox file to specify what filenames to exclude. That's fine. But please do add this feature one way or another!
+1 for .dropboxignore
I am currently using Dropbox for sharing Java (maven) projects, and problem is that I need to turn off syncronization on computer I am working on, and on end of workday, I need to clear all un-needed files and then reenable the sync, so that my source files can be synced. If I forget to enable sync again, I don't have files sync, or if I forget to turn in off on begining of the day, then a lot of files (that I don't need synced) get uploaded on dropbox account (and then deleted when I see I made a mistake).... PLEASE add this feature....
+ 10000000
need this to avoid sync node modulesWell, I see there is nothing happening there ... I really don't get wtf they are doing. On CLI systems it has been proven it was not impossible to implement this.
If you wanna RT ; https://twitter.com/pierrickbignet/status/858260861814800384
