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 good explanation of why it's not there. A quick google search reveals loads of people also looking for the same feature. I really like the workflow I have with dropbox, but it's getting to the point where I might switch providers in order to allow better selective sync.
I've seen hackish solutions using selective sync, but it would be great if this could be done in one of the following ways:
- global pattern matching eg "node_modules"
- a marker file in the directory like .dropboxignore
- a simple right click context menu "Ignore this folder"
Other than that, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Tom
I’m not sure what could be more convenient and appropriate within this context as right click, don’t sync to Dropbox. It is not selective sync at all, selective sync lets you only download certain folders you specify and the rest are ‘hidden’ in the sense that they only are visible to you on the web/through a browser. That’s not what this command does. It removes that folder and anything in it from your Dropbox period. After you run it, go on line and have a look, that folder will be gone yet on your local computer it will be there, still contained within your Dropbox/…. Folder but it will not be syncing or uploading until you tell it to be running the oppose command.
@projectdeliverypartners no that is not the functionality asked for by the OP, or I imagine most of the people in this thread as we have been discussing this for quite some time. What you are talking about is what the OP is referring to as select sync, and most of us are very well aware of it. It requires a whole process to be done on every device that you set up dropbox to sync on (now and in the future), and every folder/file that you want to not sync (again, now and in the future). The process with select sync is: sync dropbox, turn off dropbox, create the folder, use the select sync command on the folder to turn it off, add your files to the folder, turn on dropbox and resync. Not only is this mundane and sometimes unreasonable if dealing with a large number of devices and/or folders, but it is also not safe. If one folder on any device is not properly set to select sync then it will corrupt your entire sync across all devices and creates conflicts which must then each be cleaned up and the whole process repeated - for every device. This is why other services, such as github, have a .ignore file.
Further, select sync, as is, creates other issues because it still goes into that folder and locally syncs everything which can create problems with specific files -- such as in here: https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Apps-and-Installations/Bug-quot-unable-to-sync-quot-a-file-that-is-in-an-ignored-folder/m-p/777269#M67577projectdeliverypartnersFunctionally you could maybe make the argument... maybe...
However, a simple ignore file is just a lot more convenient, especially for developer folks. Especially since we can automatically let some workflow create it if we start a new project.
The supplied script you showed may work, but I guess the files have to exist. Some of these temporary directories are very dynamic with temporary files coming and going all the time, causing a lot of sync traffic, so my gut feel that it's not really what we as a community wanted.
Still useful for more basic use cases.
This feature does now exist (in my view), its the 'don't sync to dropbox' command. See my post here:
See my post here:
I do this with powershell on windows, haven't investigated on mac yet but thought this might help anyway.
re-bumping this because I am now seriously considering switching my distro over to another provider than Dropbox. It is just so unsustainable and unstable across multiple devices without this feature...
Emma I have to just post, this is becoming a major issue for me. I've been a Dropbox customer for about 10 years now, but because I've stepped more into the development side of things, not having an ignore pattern file is causing all sorts of issues.
You asked for people to explain why this is important:
I already have a script that goes through and sets the ignore flag on `node_modules` folders in my Programming folder. But when switching branches, I will sometimes need to delete `node_modules` and reinstall packages with npm. When this happens, in the few minutes before my automatic script runs, Dropbox tries to sync the folder and I've had a few times where this can cause some serious issues.
Honestly, I can't imagine this is very hard to do. Please ask the development team to prioritize this. I will start my search for an alternative anyway, because I don't have much faith this will get addressed after 98 pages of comments.these conflicts are getting really pesky, and even though I have script to go and set the attribute to ignore to a set list of folders... the behavior is still wonky and it is easy to do a slipup with the timing of when you need to do a combination of: sync, crate folders with same name that are local, ignore those local folders, resync. Especially when doing it across several devices. And one slip up will corrupt the entire Dropbox repo with conflicts. Really need a fix to this, this should be a simple feature (other software does this like GitHub).
Just adding for the benefit of others dealing with this issue, the only workaround I currently know of that _really_ works, unfortunately, is to avoid the official Dropbox clients completely and either use the Dropbox API or look for a third-party client which uses the Dropbox API and has better functionality in this regard.
This is the top-voted issue by a factor of 3 and there are already existing patterns for how the behaviour can be implemented (e.g. gitignore). Please can we prioritise this feature, it would be a massive help.
I've tried various workarounds but none are really reliable. In all of them, if you create a new folder on one of your machines, or if you get a new device, you have to be careful to remember each of your special cases and set them up, in order to avoid a huge accidental sync. This is also true for the Ignore Files feature - it is really only a workaround for these use-cases, because it's local to the device. A .dropboxignore file is the right solution; the implementation only needs to be local, but because the .dropboxignore file itself is synced, the effect will be across all my devices. Easy and effective.
