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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
There's currently 758 comments requesting this feature. Can we get an actual response from DB instead of the "we'll pass it on" canned response? As a developer with 100+ project folders, Dropbox completely pegs my CPU numerous times a day indexing all these node_modules folders.
There doesn't seem to be a valid tech reason why this can't happen - other smaller cloud services like pCloud already can do this. What possible reason is this being ignored when it has to be your most requested feature?
dman33 wrote:I've seen others ask for a way to have global pattern matching to exclude folders from dropbox, such as node_modules, and other dependancy folder patterns that are better to be reinstalled on each system.
I think the easy solution for this would be for dropbox to include an option to follow .gitignore files if included in a folder. While I don't know the scope of the implementation, for advanced users this would provide an easy way to manage syncing without having to use selective folders.
I've seen others ask for a way to have global pattern matching to exclude folders from dropbox, such as node_modules, and other dependancy folder patterns that are better to be reinstalled on each system.
I think the easy solution for this would be for dropbox to include an option to follow .gitignore files if included in a folder. While I don't know the scope of the implementation, for advanced users this would provide an easy way to manage syncing without having to use selective folders.
pCloud seems great. If the realtime file versioning is good enough I am sold
- It looks like Dropbox is not implementing this feature any time soon, just like other similar applications, they don't have this feature either. However, after a long search, I found out that pCloud does have this feature and is very easy to just add the files that you want to be ignored by name (or pattern, e.g., node_modules) in the advanced sync option. I have been trying pCloud for a couple of days in my two machines and is working great so far. Besides, it has a free subscription that gives you 10GB of storage, more than enough for my developer projects that need this kind of feature. PS. Another application, Koofr, also offers this feature, however the sync process between two machines was not good at all, so I do not recommend this one.
Yes, the top requested features are here! And dropbox gave us the middle finger again. Also why doesn't the UI update when you manually drag a file to a folder in the web app? And why is it so slow to upload a file and why are there so many errors when trying to upload multiple files. dropbox, you should focus on properly implementing the basic functionality that people want. It's a joke this hasn't been implemented yet and basic features don't function properly.
Dropbox employees added this thread to their .ignore file
Dropbox increased the limit to 2TB, but my 2018 MBP chokes indexing and syncing just 136GB of files (even with selective sync syncing just a few GB of my projects!). I imagine that is largely because of the sheer number of small files in all my node_modules and similar directories.
What is the point of increasing my storage limit if the Dropbox app can't even handle processing less than 10% of the limit?
At the very least, just let me tell Dropbox to completely ignore problem files.
DropBox just sent me an email saying “DropBox Plus” has been released:
The all-new Plus plan is packed with top-requested features.What nonsense!
This is the most requested feature! And it’s been (ironically) totally ignored by DropBox!
+1
