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Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

Tom_M
Helpful | Level 6

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

Latest Update
Emma
Community Manager

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.

Status changed to: Investigating
973 Comments
Kamik423
Explorer | Level 4

I also want to see this.

 

Example usage: I've got a shared LaTeX project in a dropbox folder. Every time I compile it builds a crapload of auxilliary files which I don't want to sync that just annoy the other people in this shared folder. I already put them in a folder named aux_tex, but I still have to disable sync manually for every new LaTeX document I start.

 

PLEASE ADD THIS FEATURE!

Walter
Dropbox Staff

Hey All, 

 

First off, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and ideas on how to improve our features and functionalities moving forward - I'll make sure to pass your comments to the team as feedback! 

 

In the meantime, mind that, as our Community Manager Ed has already outlined herethere are no plans to implement such feature at the moment as there are several workarounds to solve this (for example moving the folder out of your Dropbox folder or using Selective Sync).

 

 

Having said that, I'd really like to help with this so I have passed all of your comments to the team in my internal report. If there's anything else I can do for you, just let me know! 

 

Cheers Folks!

Walter
Dropbox Staff

Hey there @JMurph2015 - how are you today?

 

I am writing to let you know that while there aren't any plans to implement such function at the moment, I have made sure to pass all of your comments and suggestions to the dev team for review. Thank you for this feedback.

 

Should you need anything else, just let us know! 

undegroundalien
Explorer | Level 4

@Walter With all due respect, none of the "workarounds" are even close to what people's posted use cases actually need.

 

While I appreciate some sort of feedback, this answer is pretty condescending as it mischaracterizes the request and dismisses it without second thought.

 

But this hand-waving is what I'm learning to expect from Dropbox.

Walter
Dropbox Staff

Sorry to hear you felt this way @undegroundalien - it wasn't my intention at all. 

 

As I do understand the importance of this, I thought it would be nice to gather all feedback to pass along to the team so as to voice your concerns and requests. 

 

I know it's not optimal and I wish I could help more than this. 

 

 

 

undegroundalien
Explorer | Level 4

@Walter Gathering feedback and passing that to the team is indeed nice and I appreciate that it is done.

 

But please understand proposing solutions that users have repeatedly said don't fit their needs just signals that Dropbox is unwilling to even understand the request, much less act on it.

 

Walter
Dropbox Staff

Thanks for elaborating on this @undegroundalien - most appreciated. 

 

I can assure you that your feedback is always welcome and monitored. We're always looking for our users' input when creating the next version of the Dropbox app this why I made sure your comments are passed along to our dev team.

 

 

Have a lovely day!

Kamik423
Explorer | Level 4

Let me also say, that this is an issue that does not just apply to us few that commented on here. The internet is full of people wanting a feature like this: dropbox gitignore - Google Search. Many "solutions" have been proposed, all of which are either not updated in the last few years, actively broken by Dropbox updates or are utterly overcomplicated, like not blocking every file matching that name and instead having to select each one manually, defeating the purpose. None of the solutions is as simple and elegant as one built into Dropbox would be. Especially "moving the files out of Dropbox" requires lots of work and confusing file structures, defeating the purpose of easily syncing folders with my friends and colleagues.

 

A solution like this is required for many people to have Dropbox do exactly what they want and too many people have to live with workarounds, suboptimal solutions or even completely given up on that.

 

Please implement this feature! This is not directly meant as negative criticism, but as an illustration of the issue and its widespreadedness. I hope we can somehow get you to reconsider!

jojoknob
New member | Level 2

+1 Absolutely! Being able to exclude

.git

directories especially would save a lot of headaches, since they can be very large relative to the normal folder contents and are likely to already be backed up GitHub anyway!

Sherwino
Helpful | Level 5

Nobody could deny the utility of Dropbox, it is an incredibly useful tool.
The ability to be able to work on one computer and just pick up where you left off on another is great.

The best part about it is that cloud based synchronization is a feature that can be utilized by pretty much every industry. As a Software Developer I use Dropbox to synchronize and backup code from workstation to workstation with ease.

 

Developers use a lot of tools to make sure they have some kind of version control to keep track of all the changes that a project has gone through, because things break. One of the most common tools is Git.

Git creates a hidden folder called .git that contains a variety of information needed to help Git catalog and keep track of all your files. If you want to learn more about it you could read this article by a developer trying to make sense of its structure, or you could go directly to Git's website.

I mention Git for two reasons:

  • The .git folder could have thousands of files, for a small project.

Screenshot of .git folderScreenshot of .git folder

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Git has a special file called .gitignore that could tell the Git program ignore folders or files, recursively.

I commonly use my Dropbox folder, as my active working directory because it is convenient that as soon as I press save it uploads it to the cloud. So if I randomly drop my laptop into a large body of water I would be able to pull out my phone and continue working there as if nothing happened. Then, after completing a certain task I use Git to commit all of the changes I did to my code. Git keeps track of the specific changes I did so if I changed the name of a variable from,

const customersFirstName = "Bob";

to

const name = "Bob";

Git would keep track of all of those changes and let me know that I changed that specific line in my code. Dropbox doesn't keep track of those specifics, and that is fine. I just need it to back me up.

 

Now there are a few problems with this scenario, remember .git could have thousands of files? If I make a change lots of those files are constantly being modified which trigger a synchronization by Dropbox. Dropbox is usually going to update and index those .git files before it uploads your file and you will sometimes see the Dropbox icon spinning for a while before it makes it to the cloud.

 

There are situations where I would want to backup the .git folder, but in most cases that is not necessary because I use services like GitHub, and GitLab to store my .git history along with the code it is keeping track of.

 

So here I am using all of my computers resources to index and upload thousands of files that I don't even need to save on to Dropbox while my laptop is flying in the air getting ready to visit the fishes.

The .git folder is not even the real problem, the real problem has to do with files generated by package managers, or libraries utilized to make the code work. Developers constantly use resources and tools created by others to solve common problems. They often package these tools into libraries that we could just download into our project. For example I commonly use this library created by Facebook called React. So I use a package manager like NPM or Yarn to download the latest version of React into my project directory along with all of the tools and libraries that React relies on to work, because they too rely on other libraries for their library to work.

 

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When you download a library like React.js using NPM or Yarn creates a folder called node_modules and it saves everything Facebook used and needs to make React work. Now this folder is exponentially worse than the .git folder. It is common for the node_modules to have more than 20,000 files! The screenshot below is pretty much the smallest node_modules folder you could have using a React project.


084d001540363f110316bc5666b5ab2f

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This 20,000 file headache makes my computer kick up its fans and use all of its processing power to sync a node_modules folder and upload it to the cloud. It easily takes 2 hours for Dropbox to finish indexing and uploading this folder. 2 hours of Dropbox consuming your battery and CPU resources. As you could see in the screenshot above it is not because the folder is massive, it is because of the amount of items in the folder.

When developers backup their code using sites like GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab they usually update the .gitignore file to exclude the node_modules, because you don't need to keep track of and upload other people's code. Especially when you could easily download it again in another workstation if needed using the package manager.

 

The .gitignore file could also be set to ignore the node_modules recursively, or any file/folder including ones created by package managers such as, Composer, Cargo, or PIP.

 

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have ignored that folder using Dropbox?

Well we kind of have that with Selective Sync, but that doesn't quite solve the problem.
This 4 year long thread with 93,212 Views 625 Comments kind of expresses why. Dropbox also offers Smart Sync, which mimicks the behavior that OneDrive has where the files are all on the cloud until you click on them, and decide to open / download a file.

 
If you were brave enough to take a peak into that thread you saw that the solution for most people was to try another service, because why are they going to use something that causes this much issues to their workflow. While I agree, I don't feel like moving around GBs of information just because one thing didn't pan out.

In the end just I settled with what I thought is the easiest solution.
 
Just work outside of the Dropbox folder.
 
Keep the code and all other files you are working in another directory, and figure out how to back it up later.
 
All my code is being saved to the Documents folder where I then send it to Dropbox on a schedule using either a shell script or software like FreeFileSync , or SyncToy.
 
While I enjoyed the cleverness of writing my own script I enjoy the utility of having a GUI interface guide me through the process. So I ended up using FreeFileSync the most, its fast, it is useful, and it is easy to use. I use it on MacOS, Windows and Linux, and it is incredibly stable. It is faster than my shell scripts, and it has plenty of documentation on how to put it on a schedule.
 
FreeFileSync is able to exclude directories recursively and certain file types that I don't want to be pased from computer to computer.

 

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FreeFileSync is grabing files from three different computers, and synchronizing with Dropbox without all of the clutter. At the same time it would check Dropbox if there is any content or files that it does not have and it will send them to my Documents folder.
 
The biggest downside is that I don't get the the satisfaction of a files instantly being pushed to Dropbox but it will do for now.


Do you know of a better way to do this, let me know?
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1,363 votes received Status: Investigating