Control selective sync programmatically

[Igal Tabachnik]

Hello,

I'm looking for a way to control selective sync programmatically? There's a certain folder I want to sync, for example, in certain hours of the day. With a cron job, I could instruct selective sync to include/exclude a folder.

Is this possible? Can you make it possible? 🙂

Thanks!

[Greg-DB]

Thanks for the detailed feedback Adam! We don't have another place to vote on these requests; your post here is fine. Unfortunately I don't have a good solution to offer you though. Apologies I don't have any news!

[Jason R. C.]

I also would like this feature to avoid syncing other suppert files like tox virtual environments.

[b9chris]

This is my #1 problem with Dropbox. Either:

1. It's on while coding in Visual Studio, which constantly breaks the application while running and continually causes files I'm not editing to prompt me for reload. It occasionally corrupts my work, swapping in a slightly older version of a file I was just working on.

2. It's off while coding, which is the majority of my day, eliminating the real-time backup benefits of Dropbox.

3. It's off Selective Sync for my code folder, which is just 2 again

4. I Selective Sync every single scratch folder Visual Studio uses, every single bin and obj folder throughout my machine, which is at least 500 folders and increases over time as I take on new projects.

It's been 5 years of this. It's time for Dropbox to adopt a .gitignore style file. Heck just give me literally that file and name it .dropboxignore

[Jonathan L.24]

I'd like to see this too.

[IvanSt]

Need this functionality so much..

[stege]

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@Leah C.1 wrote:

I think you might be able to do this via the Dropbox Core API.

The trick would be to not sync the folder via the desktop client (by unselecting it using selective sync). Then, with your cron job, maybe check if any files need to be updated and use the /files_put method to update any changed files.

Does that sound like what you're looking for?

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[stege]

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@jeff o.4 wrote:

is there a way to tell the dropbox client to ignore certain directories and/or files in a manner similar to a .gitignore file?    

sometimes i create numerous temporary files within a directory that is sync'd via dropbox and i'd like to be able to tell the client to not bother syncing the temp files.  

of course, i can do this via the client's preferences panel, but this is onerous at best.  being able to do so from the command-line would be awesome.

thanks!

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[philip-lf]

Hey Greg, any update on a selective sync API or dropbox ignore file? thanks

[Greg-DB]

No, I don't have an update on this.

[blizzrdof77]

This would be extremely useful. Any progress @Greg-DB?