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.

[bptarpley]

I have greatly enjoyed the "packrat" feature of Dropbox which keeps a versioned archive of all of my files. As a developer, this has saved me countless times, as I don't always remember to push changes to a repo. That said, I dread anytime I start a new javascript front-end development project that uses NPM. My computer's CPU goes crazy trying to keep track of the thousands of files in the "node_modules" folder of that project, and frankly I have never once cared to have that folder synced across my devices or saved to the cloud. It would seem that both my computer (and I can only imagine the Dropbox cloud infrastructure) would greatly benefit from not having to index and save those files. Please strongly consider adding a selective ignore feature.

[Verhulstd]

Please strongly consider adding a selective ignore feature!!

[nickyhajal]

I really can't agree more.

Every few weeks my Dropbox completely borks and spends hours resyncing hundreds of thousands of files.

The vast majority of the time it is indexing and resyncing huge node_modules files which is just a huge waste of time (I know this is the case because I have selective sync keeping only a few projects synced at a time for this reason, so the only place that number of files exists is in node_modules).

Things would be so much smoother if I could just tell Dropbox to ignore all node_modules files. What is so complicated about that?

[dorival]

Need to ignore node_modules !!!

[dorival]

Sorry, need to ignore node_modules from hundreds of projects without using the UI on macOS !!!

[Kamik423]

Just to make this clear: while node_modules is one of the most common uses of this feature it is not the only one! A global option somewhere to not sync node_modules will not do it for all people!

[nickyhajal]

Absolutely, Kamik. node_modules is an obvious example, but only one of countless possible use cases.

[Eric G.11]

....I am having to deal with this issue to. it sucks....

Are there any other cloud services that deal with this?

[Kamik423]

Well, git.

I recently moved a whole bunch of projects there, for this exact reason. I now barely use Dropbox anymore.

[iSloboda]

I've unsubscribed from OneDrive & Google drive due to this issue and feel stupid that I wasn't more accurate reading about "selective sync" more carefully. Seems like Dropbox is next, **bleep**. Let's what megasync has to offer 😃