@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.

DaphneAs jvasileff mentioned, this is awesome! Already putting it into action and taking it for a spin.To build on their comment, I have a ton of projects that have a bunch of common folders like, "node_modules", "Pods", "vendor", "build", "public", etc. It's fairly challenging to have to manually go through all my projects and ignore those files.Are there any plans to have a centralized place in the Dropbox app where we can add file patterns to ignore?Thanks!

It is true that ignored folders will no longer appear in dropbox.com but substantial problems remain in place with this feature.In particular, it seems that dropbox still monitors what happens inside ignored folders. When I have a "build" folder that is set to be ignored where thousand of files change suddenly, dropbox still tries to index and even sync all files, consuming a lot of system resources. This can easily be replicated. If I go inside the build folder that I ignored and create a simple .txt file, dropbox immediately starts indexing and syncing it.

A .dropboxignore would be a very simple straight forward solution for developers as it conforms to the .gitignore standard which is proven and already used globally by developers. Further, this feature / solution would not confuse general Dropbox users because it’s an invisible file that only developers would likely work with. Per recommendation from @Lucil community advocate, please see the post below for a developer-grade workaround since the Swap-a-Roo Ignore Hack stopped working. (Updated Link)How to make Dropbox ignore node_modules folder with symbolic links (aliases) Hope this helps.

YES!!! PLEASE DO IT LIKE .gitignore does and STOP with the lousy hacks that don't work! The inability to ignore files by pattern is making Dropbox absolutely unusable for me. I too have moved all my development trees off of Dropbox and I now sync my trees across multiple machines using gitlab, which works great, but is another manual step that I shouldn't have to do, and is the reason why I use Dropbox in the first place... Between the lack of a proper ignore feature, the Case Conflicts (stupid case insensitivity, please come into the 21st century!) and Selective Sync Conflicts, using Dropbox for Linux/Unix/Mac development is just outright PAINFUL and worse than useless.

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.

Feedback on the new desktop app "ignore files" feature.

sebastian_
Collaborator | Level 8
5 years ago

cabreu, There seems to be a bug in the community forum itself. Their support team is working on it...
JimRobinson
Explorer | Level 4
5 years ago
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.
sebastian_
Collaborator | Level 8
5 years ago
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.
jvasileff
Helpful | Level 6
5 years ago
> 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.
Alexander_V
Helpful | Level 5
5 years ago
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.
Alexander_V
Helpful | Level 5
5 years ago
Another way is to sandbox Dropbox process somehow into tiny thin *nix wrap and marshal only filtered requests to the host os.
sebastian_
Collaborator | Level 8
5 years ago
jvasileff, Nice contribution and I like your automation improvement for java development.
NormSash
New member | Level 2
5 years ago
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.
Alexander16
Helpful | Level 6
5 years ago
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.
XionicFire
Collaborator | Level 9
5 years ago
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