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
@Jasper - Also .vagrant folders, composer vendor dir, ruby gems, etc.—almost any language has folders with giant dependency trees, and many tools (Docker, Vagrant, etc.) create one or more hidden dirs with either giant files or hundreds of small files.
Every time I set up a new project inside my Dropbox, I have to remember to quickly set up selective sync options—on all my computers—to exclude said folders, otherwise I'll notice that gigabytes of bandwidth or tons of CPU have been consumed later, then I'll have to rebuild the project after fixing up selective sync options.
I'm amazed this isn't higher on Dropbox's internal radar, for the simple fact of dogfooding—surely some of the Dropbox internal devs have run into this issue?
Yeah it seems that DropBox is not following this thread on issues for developers and the need to be able to ignore certain files when working with DropBox. A .dropboxignore like a .gitignore would really be a good thing and will help developers a lot. Not just the ones using Node, but also the ones using Git or SVN or any other version control.
Still, I do think it is good to keep the thread going. Something surely will have to change. Either by DropBox or by another party that comes along and offers what is needed.@Guido Walter P.
I've been using MEGAsync which has this feature and a fairly generous free plan. Dropbox just gets used for old backups now.
Please add this feature!
I have been subscribed to this thread for a year, receiving a couple of hundreds of notifications of people interested in the same feature, and no reaction from Dropbox.
Sadly, there is still no decent alternative to Dropbox, so I will stick with it; still, I am quite surprised at Dropbox lack of concern for the dev community in this case.
I'm unsubscribing from this thread as there's really no hope.
Looking for good alternatives to Dropbox.
Will check in a year or two if anything happened.
+1
Looks like another cloud storage provider called pcloud has this feature and you get 10gb of free space on sign up (up to 20 for referring freinds).
About to give it a try now.
https://www.pcloud.com/help/drive-help-center/what-does-ignore-the-following-patterns-mean
Implement this feature please :D
One way to avoid this is just to make symbolic links, but that can be a very tedious process depending on file structure.
