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.
cabreu, There seems to be a bug in the community forum itself. Their support team is working on it...
This has been a problem for many years, why is there no .dropboxignore? I don't see how setting a file attribute helps as the folders most developers care about get deleted and re-created may times a day, for example node_modules or "build" folders with compiled artifacts. I'm interested to see Sebastian s suggestion when the problem with the link is fixed.
JimRobinson cabreu I've reposted the ignore node_modules solution as the first version is stuck with technical support working on a fix. Hopefully this new re-post is accessible. (It currently comes up for me in incognito mode, so it should work.)
How to make Dropbox ignore node_modules folder with symbolic links (aliases)
The post is specifically written for use for Javascript / TypeScript Node development as the node_modules folder is massive and shouldn't be sync'd with the cloud storage. Each machine will have its own "non-sync'd" instance via symlink in the ~/Downloads folder.
NOTE: This same technique can be used to ignore other folder types with drag-n-drop aliases.
> My laptop is running hot most of the time now
That's really the biggest problem - syncing build folders destroy battery life. My workaround is to pause the sync, but that creates a mess if I forget to re-enable when I'm done with my work.
> Many developers have ephemeral node_modules or build folders that create new files/folders without extended attributes
Yes.
You can perform MITM attack on Dropbox process an hijack requests to read and write to HDD. Basically I think it's possible to create own wrapper HDD driver that will provide "per-process" controll of what visible/writable. Maybe looking into open-source NTFS implementation will give a hint. Anyway I'm always lazy in doing such stuff but maybe somebody has a good programmer friend who could research on that idea.
Another way is to sandbox Dropbox process somehow into tiny thin *nix wrap and marshal only filtered requests to the host os.
jvasileff, Nice contribution and I like your automation improvement for java development.
This feature is definitly needed. And I really hope there is a global admin space for this so that we can login to the admin console and specify file types, file names, and folder names that we never want synced no matter where they exist on client systems. I don't want to go to every computer and set up the masks. And by having it in the web admin area if the exclusions need to chagne I can simply change it there and it is automatically applied to every client computer.
Can I suggest that we also have the ability to ignore new folder requests or events. The problem with wildcards is that you may not be able to anticipate the creation of all folder names that may have large files that would swamp your local drive.
In response to peoples comments, i have my dropbox on D:\ and the ignore command works perfectly.
Sorry i posted this here but if i try to post it in the tips and tricks section dropbox keeps flagging this as spam
