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Investigating
Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync
Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a g...
Hi,
I am using Dropbox 3.2.6 for Windows. Dropbox offers the possibility to exclude certain folders from synchronization. I suggest that there is added a functionality to exclude certain files from synchronization.
Dropbox excludes already certain system files such as desktop.ini. These are Windows system files... other software might add to the list of files that should not be synchronized. For instance, Thunderbird creates a file parent.lock in order to avoid that a second version of Thunderbird is started in parallel. This file is locked and may not be touched: it leads to a synchronization failure. It would be great if I could edit the list of files not to by synchronized and add files such as parent.lock
Best
Chris
Sigh. Okay, Christian, I figured out how to do this (but it isn't intuitive and it really still ought to be added to DB.
Here are the steps to take to make DB selective sync a file (it's a bit of a kludge but let's hope DB never removes it):
To exclude FILES, not folders, from Dropbox, there is a trick you can do:
Move the file somewhere else
Create a folder with the same name in place of the file
Go to Dropbox selective sync options and ignore the folder, this will also delete it
Move the file back in place
I got this from a superuser forum and it makes sense -- and in some way I understand why DB works like this. But it would be SO much easier if DB just had an option when you right clicked a file in your folder (either in the desktop app or the browser app) where you could choose not to have that particular file synced without having to go through this process.