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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
- Ed
Dropbox Staff
Hi all,
A Dropbox response is long overdue here - I've been following this for months and I haven't gotten any positive feedback on whether this is happening.
You're welcome to continue adding suggestions and feature improvement requests. I try to keep all product updates I can get info on here: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-News/ct-p/101006
+1
It's been almost 3 years. Can the devs give an answer or is this a place where suggestions go to die?
- This would be very, very helpful - I have made node_modules directories which are all temp directories and add up to a tremendous amount of space and bandwidth. Being able to exclude temp files that Dropbox doesn't know are temp files would be very large savings.
I agree! And it should allow both folders and files and file extensions to be ignored. For example, I'd ignore *.bak, *.tmp, and *.pch (Visual Studio precompiled [temporary] headers).
Having a .dropboxignore file would be great, but maybe too complicated for the normal user. But a right-click "Ignore" in the Drobox section of the shortcut menu would be really easy for users. Or even an Ignore tab in settings (so we could specify wildcards as I mentioned above).
I agree with others that I'm ready to change to a different solution than Dropbox. I don't want to sound threatening and I'm sure Dropbox would hardly notice a thousand of us moving elsewhere, but there are other cloud based services that do this. I mostly stay with Dropbox because I have a year of file history there.
+1000!!!
I don't know why dropbox doesn't have this feature yet, but in the meantime...
I takes a while but it works to exclude at least node_modules folders:
Just go to your work directory...
dropbox exclude add `ls -lR . | grep -v "node_modules.*node_modules:$" | grep "node_modules:$"`@Travis M.7 It's definitely not an insurmountable technical nightmare. They already have the selective sync option, and this would just be an extension of that. I'm not saying there wouldn't be complications, and that it wouldn't require thought to ensure it was done correctly and not interfere with the selective sync options, but 2.5+ years is more than enough time to implement the most requested feature on their forums.
Considering this is an "advanced" feature, used by developers, it doesn't even need to be very pretty.
Their reasons are definitely not purely technical, and financial seems the next most likely option.
They are already ignoring folders. They call it "selective sync".
The only needed difference is that they will not DELETE THE CONTENT of the local folder when selecting it.
They could EASILY add this checkbox and do an IF statement to decide if they should delete the content of the local folder or not.
They simply do not care, and/or (as my guess) have a financial interest to keep it that way.
I highly doubt that is the case. It most likely just doesn’t make sense financially for them because of the amount of work it would take due to technical reasons we don’t know about. That being said... this is getting a bit sad that they haven’t responded yet. :/
