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Forum Discussion
Sam Hutch
4 years agoExplorer | Level 4
Stop Selective Sync from automatically adding new files/folders added on the web client
Hi, hopefully I'm missing something obvious but really struggling with this one.
I'm part of a Dropbox Team with 10+ TB of storage used. My personal folder has ~1.5TB. I'd like to set up selective sync to *only* sync one small folder (>1GB of documents) so that I can easily access them on multiple devices.
To be clear- folder structure is MyName/MyDocuments. There's a bunch of stuff in MyName and I only want MyDocuments to sync.
Works great conceptually, but anytime I add a new file or folder to MyName in the web client, Selective Sync automatically selects and downloads that file. I then have to go into my preferences, manually uncheck whatever was added, and even then I'm still left with essentially empty folders (I'm *never* going to access those files through the desktop app).
Is there a way to make that Selective Sync stick to just the one folder, and not automatically expand out? Or am I missing something here and just going about this the wrong way? Thanks in advance!
Sam Hutch wrote:
Is there a way to make that Selective Sync stick to just the one folder, and not automatically expand out?
No, that's not how the feature functions. Instead, create another folder within MyName and remove it using Selective Sync, then add your files to that new folder instead of directly to the MyName folder.
- RichSuper User II
Sam Hutch wrote:
Is there a way to make that Selective Sync stick to just the one folder, and not automatically expand out?
No, that's not how the feature functions. Instead, create another folder within MyName and remove it using Selective Sync, then add your files to that new folder instead of directly to the MyName folder.
- Sam HutchExplorer | Level 4
Thanks - very concise (and in hindsight, obvious!) solution. Much appreciated!
- p aplin vftHelpful | Level 5
This happens even with folders added by other useers to a teams dropbox; so instead of only seeing my job, it keeps putting additional folders with other projects into my selective sync. This seems to not be limited to the web interface as it occurs following changes from the desktop apps too.
I remove these folders from the sync manually each time, however with just my team thats 8x manual removal every two-three days.
Is this really how 'Selective Sync' is meant to work? That isnt very selective. Should the functionality be that, at most, it adds new folders and files I create outside of the already syncing items?
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