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
So I'll be able to stop syncing hundreds of thousands of dependency and log files in vain, lowering a lot the stress on both my machines and their servers.
I'm pretty sure that every single developer would benefit from this functionality along with the company itself with bandwidth and storage savings. How do they quantify demand? +1's here?
Many thanks to all who have added their +1s so far. Dropbox support have now started to take notice, and are apparently now estimating the demand for this. So please keep the votes coming, and it would be good if people add their own reasons on why this feature would be helpful.
God I need this so much.
this would be a great thing. for example firefox and thunderbird create a file named parent.lock which is necessary for normal the operation of firefox or thunderbird. dropbox isn't able to sync while those files exist. the files normally are deleted when ff or tb are closed and all processes are stopped. but in some reason they remain till reboot. there is no need for those files to be synced. there a mask for adding exclusions would be very helpful
This is what I had back from Dropbox support last month on this issue. Don't know whether the dev team took any notice, but I will keep pestering:
"Thank you for this feedback. We are always looking for user input when creating the next version of the Dropbox app.
Unfortunately, I do not have access to the exact roadmap and am not able to say whether or not there is a plan for a similar feature.
However, I think the idea makes a lot of sense and I will make sure your comments are passed along to our development team."Agreed. There is cold be hidden for advanced users feature. We are all here by '.dropboxignore' keyword. So it wouldn’t be a problem to figure out how it works. Just implement it.
I just have stopped the sync of my Projects folder because it was 3Gb+. Mostly it was .git and node_modules folders. With such setup Dropbox is downloading file list forever. And consuming to much CPU
I guess the people at dropbox did see this thread, so I thought to tweet it for their convenience:
https://twitter.com/unlucio/status/616141948441628672please RT if you like.
+1e100 for .dropboxignore
