You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Feedback on the new desktop app "ignore files" feature.
@Daphne that's great news! I look forward to trying it out.
But it would also be nice to have a configuration file, like ".dropboxignore", to list paths or patterns to exclude. The reason is that extended attributes are tied to the actual file or folder, and will be gone if the file or folder is deleted and recreated.
The common use case for this is a software build folder that gets deleted and recreated on clean builds. Under xattr system, the "new" build folder would sync to Dropbox even if the "old" build folder had the necessary com.dropbox.ignored xattr.
Daphne This is not a workable solution because on Windows, the `Set-Content -Stream` command is only available on files on the same drive as the operating system. So anyone that uses a secondary drive for Dropbox won't be able to use this feature...
Why not just enable a .dropboxignore? Or just a right click option?
@Daphne Okay, XionicFire was right, I was simply having an issue because my paths had square brackets `[]` in them and I needed to use `-LiteralPath` instead of `-Path`.
However, even after ignoring the folders I wanted to ignore, Dropbox is still deciding to index them on every change and is locking file access when doing so, which is causing me lots of problems.
Dropbox shouldn't be accessing the files inside of an ignored folder at all. Also, Dropbox didn't used to lock file access when indexing/syncing, what changed?I've had a conversation with a Dropbox developer about them porting stuff to Rust. Between the lines he said that implementing ignoring files by setting the file attribute was the least amount of work of getting this implementing. This seemed to indicate that Dropbox still hasn't thought this through from the perspective of the user. I hope this will be revisited, because the current functionality is clumsy. If you delete a file from Dropbox, the attributes are gone. If a tool re-creates the file, you can start all over. We need an ignore file. Now.
Just to state the obvioius: The "solution" being beta tested, see https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/ignored-files, is completely inadequate. Do we really need to type long mysterious shell commands to ignore files or directories? A far, far better solution would be simplistic wildcard filters on file names or directory names that can apply globally.
In addition, a *big* use for the feature is for large work files that are repeatedly created and deleted by programs such as Visual Studio or WinEdt and that cause problems because Dropbox briefly locks them. There is no way to use this ad hoc command line solution on files that are being constantly created automatically by software such as Vusual Studio.
Hi, would like to suggest a feture request.
I think that it wold be helpfull for developers, adding some sort of .dropignore or to make dropbox use .gitignore files.
I Have few repositorys in dropbox, that are using npm modules, and cache for a game projects.
I don't want to make dropbox take every file change in this folders, this would make more scence to have that per machine...
However i can't find way to build up that routine automaticaly... Maybe there is also a feture that already does that?
- Daphne
Dropbox Staff
Hi there antokhio, thanks for posting here!
Would this feature do the trick for you? It's not exactly what you suggested, but it would give the same end result.
Let me know if this helps!
Daphne Why are you still recommending this when we keep telling you why it's useless? For how many YEARS are you going to totally ignore the CLEAR issues that we have REPEATEDLY listed it's problems? This is a SOLVED problem, JUST IMPLEMENT .dropboxignore. Not some hacky solution that takes a ton of work AND doesn't actually work how we need it to AND still eats our CPU indexing the files. Stop just stringing us along saying "your listening" every few months and not doing anything because you clearly aren't if you're still pitching this attribute solution.
- Daphne
Thanks for all your feedback so far on this!
As this is in beta, I don't have any additional info to share on whether these functionalities (such as ignore by patterns etc) will be added.
We really appreciate the interest and feedback you've given on this, and letting us know how those additions would help with your workflow.
So keep it coming! I'll make sure to pass along your feedback to our dev team and keep you all up to date with any news here.
Hope you all have a wonderful day ahead! :grin:
I will weigh in on this: Please add a .gitignore (or .dropboxignore) file that will instruct dropbox to ignore files and folders similar to GIT
I hope that the ignored files will continue to be ignored if they are removed and regenerated, e.g, `rm -rf node_modules && npm install`
Hi sebastian_ ,
I was curious to see your link but it says that the message I am trying to access is not available.
