Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

Hey sagarisms, thanks for sharing your thoughts here!

I just wanted to jump in and mention that perhaps Smart Sync would be the feature you're looking for.

It allows you to see your full file structure in your local Dropbox folder, without taking space on your hard drive.

I hope this helps!

Daphne Really? Now that I just cancelled my Dropbox subscription? Wow, what a coincidence! Haha, I guess I have to reconsider... although it will be hard to trade in 1GB of ram again just for the dropbox client running...

In addition to all the valuable comments above, I simply do not undersrtand why Dropbox cannot retain entire folder structures & filenames locally while not actually hosting the file on the local computer?

It is just bad UX.

A lot of individuals are refraining from using the internet to focus on getting work done even though they might be technically connected in the background. From an experience perspective it is rather cumbersome to go to the browser each time one even needs to look up a file.

Allowing to access one's entire folder & file view locally, as part of OS finder/filemanager view is extremely helpful, even if they are not hosted locally.

:heart:

Hi there everyone, just wanted to update you with some good news!

We're currently working on a feature to allow you to ignore local folders from syncing with your Dropbox account.

At the moment, this is currently in beta so isn't available to all users, but we're working hard to roll this out to more users in the future.

You can find the steps along with some additional info on this from here.

Thank you all for showing your interest in this!

For those of you liking pCloud. I found that for the ignore to work you need to have the folder being used outside of pCloud and then you use the sync to bring it in. 
So your really not working directly off of your cloud drive. 
you end up having to download the folder off of pCloud to work on it. 

After recommendations from other people in this thread, I've finally decided to try pCloud.

It's an amazing service. It's all I wanted in a virtual drive service, without any of the garbage.

It automatically creates a virtual drive that contains files and folders (without taking local space). Uploads and downloads are super fast, without any of the extremely slow starting/sync times DropBox has given me (even though I have 600mb there, more than DropBox). This has all worked much better than DropBox's Smart Sync.

The kicker is: it comes with global file ignoring by pattern by default. Something that DropBox can't find the time or the will to implement, even after years of requests, is a default feature...

And if anything, the lack of certain features like document-ending (i.e. DropBox Paper) mean to me that pCloud is focused in providing the best virtual file experience for users than actually need it, rather than trying to expand the business horizontally and letting the virtual file service features mummify over time.

I've started migrating all my stuff to pCloud. So far I don't see any downside, and I'm happy to support a small company trying to do one thing right. It'll take a few months for me to do the transition (and I still have some time left on my DropBox paid tier anyway) but I'm very happy so far.

So, you know, just ignore this thread's requests as you have, DropBox. On a long enough timeline, it won't matter.

carlbrusse I always did as explained in the solution in that link you wrote and it seems there are no issues.

For example I have a project MyProject, where inside there are several folders and files. Among these there is the infamous node_modules folder.

I copy on my desktop the node_modules and I let Dropbox sync that the node_modules folder is gone.

I create a folder inside MyProject called node_modules and I let Dropbox to sync again.

Then I do selective sync removing node_modules from synced files

Now I copy back the node_modules in my desktop where it was before inside MyProject folder.

This process is very annoying but at least seems to work still. And I don't usually create new projects every other day so for me is still reasonable.

Can you confirm that works? Which OS?

PS. When I install packages (change the node_modules folder files) Dropbox still uses 100% CPU for a while though since is calculating differences. Dropbox, this should be optimised, it's very very annoying.

There are so many threads on this, and the recent changes which have removed the workaround, but apparently it is all 'solved'...

e.g.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/How-to-manually-stop-sync-of-a-folder-but-still-retain-local/td-p/360922

I'm aghast that this is not possible. More than that, for years I have used the selective sync hack to reproduce this behavior but a few days ago I started having Selective Sync Conflicts