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Forum Discussion
Add ".dropboxignore" to automatically ignore files/folders when syncing.
Currently the only way to exclude from dropbox sync is via the GUI as far as I understand. This is extremely cumbersome, because if you are writing code in a directory there are many reasons to want to exclude folders/files such as "node_modules" which can be quite large and hundreds of files while syncing the rest.
Adding a ".dropboxignore", similar to a ".gitignore" file that enables direct or glob-like pattern matching exclusions would go a long way to enhance the experience for users, as well as significantly reducing the burden on your servers.
- Nancy
Dropbox Staff
Hi kwar13, thanks for posting on our Community today.
First of all, I’d like to thank you for your feedback on this; it’s really appreciated.
I’d also like you to have a look at this idea and let me know if it describes mostly what you’d like to achieve (if it does, please vote for it, as well).
Let me know if that helps.
It does address the issue. However the issue is "10 years old"! Clearly not a priority for dropbox...
I mean git has had this feature for years. Dropbox also struggles when the number of files to sync blows up to many thousand small fields which routinely happens in coding and package management. So it is more of a necessary feature, not just a convenience.
- Nancy
I understand what you mean. I’ve passed all of your comments to our team as feedback in the meantime, so that they can take this into account.
In case anyone stumbles upon this thread, in the absence of a dropbox provided solution here is something I hacked together works:
https://github.com/kavehtehrani/dropbox-exclude
