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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
Well this issue has apparently been around for a while and is completely being ignored. Looooooooooooks like I'll be moving to other dropboxx program
Can we please get some feedback from Dropbox staff on this feature?
another +1
With all the posts here about lack of pricing tiers, shared folder quotas, and low margins, it makes no sense for Dropbox to offer such little control over syncing. I sync A LOT of junk like temp files because it's buried in larger local folders with important content and there is no practical means to filter it out. I looked at using a 3rd party clients which can connect to Dropbox and exclude by type or name, but they lose block level syncing capability.
Dave, I would gladly pay $20 for a simple, reliable and well-maintained third party tool to achieve this. Though an open-source solution would be appreciated to be able to audit the code.
I am a bit worried with more complex ad hoc implementations like Boxifier which are fantastic in theory, but that constantly have to catch up with the non documented behavior of the official client (and make you run the risk of losing files every now and then!). It is a shame the Windows official client is not open-source nor has a suitable API nor has a CLI as in Linux.
For now I am trying to make use of the excellent (and free) ODrive, which is basically an alternate Dropbox client. It allows a much better selective sync process (that DOES NOT HANG for hours contrarily to the official Dropbox client), but no gitignore-like functionality (for now).
I understand you are able to make Dropbox ignore existing files on the disk by not being aware of them, however are you 100% sure the client would not be able to circumvent that through the use of other Win32 APIs? How do you prevent Dropbox from syncing an existing remote tmp file onto the local computer, when it is marked as to be ignored?+100086
Wondering what people would pay for a product like this?
We built one that ignores *.tmp??? files as the program in use by staff at this place was generating tmp save files every 5 minutes and we couldnt stop it.
Built for Windows its hard coded to that only but would not take much to use a wildcard/regex matching list.
Essentially it hides files from specified applications accessing the filesystem folder lists.
Dropbox please!
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For Vagrant I recommend to check this out: https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/3362
+1 This is causing serious problems with Vagrant. :(
This feature is a must-have for developers!
