Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

I would love to put my code projects into a dropbox sync area, and I don't mind creating an extra dropbox ignore file so that the auto-generated code and/or dependency package locations do not make noise in dropbox. (ie, regularly re-created or destroyed files can fill delete/recovery history with noise)

Would love to see a .dropboxignore to exclude files and folders by pattern. The current method of excluding one by one is tedious.

Happy 10-year anniversary Dropbox idea.

10 years without ANY progress on something that should be so easy to implement. Fortunately there are now other options, like syncthing and Koofr that support .gitignore style ignore folders.

I've written the article on the subject: Dropbox: How to Ignore Users for 10 Years (Dropbox doesn't allow to put a link in a comment so here it is: https://dev.to/melanchall/dropbox-how-to-ignore-users-for-10-years-hdn). There Dropbox will find (it it wants) all the required info about what we need and what pain we have.

It's just a nonsense to ignore us for such a long time.

DelugeIA I've been actively monitoring every response in this thread for 10 years and have on multiple times raised alarms when they try closing this discussion to rile people up to make them reopen it. I cannot for the life of me understand how the most requested feature EVER, which isn't even that complex, has been unaddressed for 10 years. 

I will grant you that right clicking and telling Dropbox to not sync a folder works fine for most users and most cases.

My problem, and seemingly the problem that others are facing, is that if you have to do this for EVERY instance where you don't want material to be copied. There is no way to say don't ever sync a "build" folder, or a "temp" folder, or a ".git" folder, or a "my_secret_stash_of_pron" folder. You must first create the folder and then tell Dropbox to ignore it.

When I create a new project in Visual Studio Code, I want most of it backed up! I want Dropbox to actively record my changes to my source, libraries, and configurations. I want Dropbox to help serve as an immediate backup between saves. I want Dropbox to make it so that I can pick up an active project from another machine. These are all great things!

But every project that I start or do work on, I have to remember to go in and exclude certain folders every time. If I forget, I will inevitably run into problems when Dropbox has a (very brief) lock on a file and thus ACTIVELY INTERFERES with the build process where dozens/hundreds of temporary files are created and destroyed. I will get inevitably get an error message that XYZ files cannot be removed or is locked by another process. The same with Git, when I'm moving between branches or committing changes, Dropbox will try to sync all the tiny changes that happen to hundreds/thousands of tiny files in the object .git/objects directory.

I cannot fathom how the Dropbox developers themselves don't understand this need?!
I just want to be able to configure a single file, or even go in and set a preference that is able to use wildcard characters:

C/Users/imsolazy/Dropbox/**/.git
C/Users/imsolazy/Dropbox/**/.build
C/Users/imsolazy/Dropbox/Project/*/.vscode
C/Users/imsolazy/Dropbox/Project/*/tmp
C/Users/imsolazy/Dropbox/Project/*/vendor

This way when I create a new project, I'm confident that Dropbox is backing up my important stuff but isn't causing undue problems.

Respectfully submitted to the void,

-- Jeff Sorensen

A new user in our lab just set up our Dropbox repo on their computer, but did not follow the proper order of things to get it working with a local folder within the Dropbox directory. The order being:
(1) sync with current state of the Dropbox,
(2) turn off sync,
(3) make the new folder that will be ignored,
(4) issue the command to ignore that folder,
(5) turn on sync.
The local folder is used to store specific settings and files to their local setup, that differs for each computer/user/setup. We are running script, from within the Dropbox directory, that needs to know where that local folder is. The main idea of keeping it within the Dropbox directory was to reduce setup steps the user has to do to get everything working. However, because the user did not follow the order of operations needed to be done above (they skipped step 2), the local folder created "Item Conflict" folders in every user's setup and effectively corrupted all of them. Now we need to go through and clean this up for every user/computer.

The user-side solution to this is to pull the local folder out of the Dropbox directory and require users to point to their local folder when setting up their environment. This adds a step that we were trying to mitigate though, which would be easily fixed with an .ignore file -- so that every user that sets up their environment automatically has this local directory available to them (and the script knows exactly where it is) after syncing Dropbox, without needing to create new folders and pointing to it or otherwise adding additional steps. When we develop repositories with GitHub, the .gitignore file accomplishes this for us by ignoring all wild cards within that local folder. I hope this shows a use case for this, like Emma asked for. It's not a needed feature, but a very useful one. I think there is a lot of confusion going around in this thread, and I hope this clears some of it up and shows a specific use case where it is beneficial. That's it, thanks for listening. 

projectdeliverypartnersLike I said - if it works for you great - it's not the solution that works for the rest of us.

I think everything we do is probably very similar, we work on files on a computer and often not in the same location as our colleagues. We don’t want Dropbox syncing certain files within a certain folder for whatever reason. Its not hard, and from reading this thread i doubt any of you have tried this at all yet your saying it doesn’t work. Emma summed it up beautifully, what would a .Dropbox placeholder do that the don’t sync feature doesn’t?  Or another way to put it, what other cloud based solutions of this dollar level do what you’re asking? I don’t reckon any of them come close. Google kind of has something but it’s a mess. 
I got it working with a placeholder as the trigger anyway, if I tidied it up and triple checked everything would you use it cause that would be a little bit of work, not heaps but ya know 

projectdeliverypartners- as mentioned now several times by several people, it is not really ideal for many other types of workflows or use cases. It may work for you and your use case, so then that is fine. However, this is not the solution we are seeking.

Also, some feedback from dropbox is desperately needed as this idea is hitting it's 10 year anniversary.