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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
Just to make this clear: while node_modules is one of the most common uses of this feature it is not the only one! A global option somewhere to not sync node_modules will not do it for all people!
Sorry, need to ignore node_modules from hundreds of projects without using the UI on macOS !!!
Need to ignore node_modules !!!
I really can't agree more.
Every few weeks my Dropbox completely borks and spends hours resyncing hundreds of thousands of files.
The vast majority of the time it is indexing and resyncing huge node_modules files which is just a huge waste of time (I know this is the case because I have selective sync keeping only a few projects synced at a time for this reason, so the only place that number of files exists is in node_modules).
Things would be so much smoother if I could just tell Dropbox to ignore all node_modules files. What is so complicated about that?
Please strongly consider adding a selective ignore feature!!
I have greatly enjoyed the "packrat" feature of Dropbox which keeps a versioned archive of all of my files. As a developer, this has saved me countless times, as I don't always remember to push changes to a repo. That said, I dread anytime I start a new javascript front-end development project that uses NPM. My computer's CPU goes crazy trying to keep track of the thousands of files in the "node_modules" folder of that project, and frankly I have never once cared to have that folder synced across my devices or saved to the cloud. It would seem that both my computer (and I can only imagine the Dropbox cloud infrastructure) would greatly benefit from not having to index and save those files. Please strongly consider adding a selective ignore feature.
🎵 do something I'm giving up on you
tired
Evernote lack markdown support for a long time, many users have left.
Dropbox, what are you doing everyday?
Its been 5 years since the first request of that feature.
Thousands of your users asked one feature:
Let us, your users, configure which file types dropbox should ignore via config file similar to .gitignore
You've told us hundreds of times that "you will take that idea to the developers' consideration"
Its been 5 years since the first request of that feature.
Please provide an official response from your development team and product management team:
- Why it is not yet considered to be implemented?
- Enumerate all the downsides of that feature for your business/tech.
The purpose of this topic is to sync your vision of your product (Dropbox) with your actual audience(users).
Thanks, A.
- This is a really annoying problem. I have projects in different places and have to choose selective sync for each one. Don't have that kind of time in my life. At the very least, allow us to batch exclude any directory with the name *\.Rproj.user
