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.
Status:
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...
A new user in our lab just set up our Dropbox repo on their computer, but did not follow the proper order of things to get it working with a local folder within the Dropbox directory. The order being:
(1) sync with current state of the Dropbox,
(2) turn off sync,
(3) make the new folder that will be ignored,
(4) issue the command to ignore that folder,
(5) turn on sync.
The local folder is used to store specific settings and files to their local setup, that differs for each computer/user/setup. We are running script, from within the Dropbox directory, that needs to know where that local folder is. The main idea of keeping it within the Dropbox directory was to reduce setup steps the user has to do to get everything working. However, because the user did not follow the order of operations needed to be done above (they skipped step 2), the local folder created "Item Conflict" folders in every user's setup and effectively corrupted all of them. Now we need to go through and clean this up for every user/computer.
The user-side solution to this is to pull the local folder out of the Dropbox directory and require users to point to their local folder when setting up their environment. This adds a step that we were trying to mitigate though, which would be easily fixed with an .ignore file -- so that every user that sets up their environment automatically has this local directory available to them (and the script knows exactly where it is) after syncing Dropbox, without needing to create new folders and pointing to it or otherwise adding additional steps. When we develop repositories with GitHub, the .gitignore file accomplishes this for us by ignoring all wild cards within that local folder. I hope this shows a use case for this, like Emma asked for. It's not a needed feature, but a very useful one. I think there is a lot of confusion going around in this thread, and I hope this clears some of it up and shows a specific use case where it is beneficial. That's it, thanks for listening.