Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

[Tom_M]

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

[Emma]

Hi folks, 

Thanks for your feedback on this.
While ignored files delivers for some of the use cases here, I appreciate it does not for all. 
We'll be taking another review of this thread to isolate use cases for a .dropboxignore file feature in particular.

I've updated the status and we'll take this to the product team.
As a side note, it would be helpful for us if you could outline the gap between what ignored files offers, and what a .dropboxignore file feature would add to your workflows.

Thank you.

[sgodoyt]

+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:$" | grep "node_modules:$"`

[Steve A.13]

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.

[lukewilliams]

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.

[mirkea]

It's been almost 3 years. Can the devs give an answer or is this a place where suggestions go to die?

[kilian]

+1

[Ed]

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

[Johnny W.2]

How can we put pressure on Dropbox to start listening to their customers? Maybe start directly pinging their CEO or CTO?

[josephniet]

+1000

Currently syncing multiple large PSDs for a project over slow connection & want to ignore the ones I know won't be needed by client. Moving individual files out of my dropbox gets messy and means more work for me when the project is completed & i need to archive it to local storage.

The way github implements this with .gitignore was perfect.

[josephniet]

+1 for this. Really badly needed feature that is present in other sync solutions I use.

[maverick]

+100000000000000000000