Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

My frustration grows...

I have decided to cancel my DB account and I'm now in the process of moving everything to a competittor service.

I decided to also take this oppertunity to reorganise all my data. This required a full sync to a Windows machine I have. However, I have about 600k+ files totaling just under 300GB and you will not believe how the client struggles to index and maintain all these files - the client crashes regularly. Yes, a lot of the files are duplicates, like Python "venv" directories in project directories. BTW: the machine specs is not an issue: 8-core with 32GB RAM.

But I find now that when I synced ALL files to a Windows workstation, the client just cannot cope with the large amount of files.

SO I don't see any practical way that DB can cope with my actual work demands going forward. This is it then for me - the last straw so to speak... Cheers DB. 

Believe it or not, I find it hard to find a solution that is as reliable as DB and has the same amount of integration with other services (e.g. synology cloud sync). 

edit: last time I wanted to try pcloud it told me that it requires FUSE on macOS, which does not seem to be updated for the most recent version of macOS (catalina), however version 3.8.4 of pcloud seems to be updated for catalina, time to try :-D

After so many hacks, the question becomes why someone would stay on Dropbox when you have to patch everything together.  There are plenty of alternatives that are as good as DB, if not better.

I was reluctant to switch off DB due to just being lazy, but moving everything took about 45 minutes and has saved me tremendously.  Now everytime I switch branches and need to rebuild/reinstall node_modules folder, I have nothing to worry about.  Node modules is ignored out of the box.

I just stumbled across a this work-around. It is kinda obvious but never came to my mind. The idea is to use some local syncing software (e.g. goodsync) that allows filtering analogous to .gitignore to sync a local work directory that contains folders like node_modules with a synced folder that rests in dropbox and is a stripped down version of the full folder. I guess it solves the problem if space is not an issue.   

It seems our favorite hackish solution stopped working for me after the recent update. This feature suggestion is undoubtedly the top rated, and is suggested 5 years ago, and now even hacky solution is not working. Given these facts, it becomes more and more reasonable to believe that Dropbox is intentionally preventing the users to take benefit of this feature... Does premium account actually provide this feature, so that's the reason why Dropbox is just keep ignoring this request?

miromannino I agree, but this possibility made me move back to DB from a little excursion into iCloud drive, which sadly does not offer an ignore option either. 

Yes that is exactly what I do now... I move the node_modules folder somewhere else and I create an empty node_modules folder, then I unsync that and copy the node_modules back where it was. I mean it works, but still it's not convinient.

miromannino To ignore a node_modules folder, for me the old trick still works where you make a backup of the folder you want dropbox to ignore, disable syncing with that folder in the dropbox settings (which REMOVES the folder from your machine), and then just copy it back to the original destination from the backup. Any further changes to that folder should be ignored by dropbox now.

We tried something similar to the approach above but it just got too cumbersome with all the projects rolling through here.

This feature request is marked in their "not for right now" category with 1,014 votes with second place coming in at 171.  They've shown they're not really interested in what their users want.  They're not focusing on what made them popular to begin with - their sync engine.  Much of their attention appears to be on the docs/Paper/Showcse products which to this day I've never seen anyone use.

The only option at this point is to ditch Dropbox.  We will be after our plan runs out.

Not sure if suggested before but I resolved the issue on Mac with manual symlinks.

1. Create a folder named "Symlinked" in ~/Library/Caches
2. Recreate empty ignored folders in a separate directory for each project (like "proj_A/packages", "proj_B/node_modules")
3. Remove ignored folders from Dropbox if they were created previously
4. Create symlinks for each ignored folder:

ln -s  /Users/MyUser/Library/Caches/Symlinked/ProjectA/packages /Users/MyUser/Dropbox/ProjectA/packages

Probably it could be automated but I don't have much stuff, so I just copy-pasted it a couple of dozens of times into the Terminal, changing names of the directories.