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 e...
Daphne
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHello everyone, I hope you're all doing well!
I just wanted to ping you all as I've moved your feedback on this feature here, so that we can better keep track of all your comments.
I've passed this all along to our devs for them to review, so thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and experience on using this feature so far.
The feature is still in beta, so the team is still working on this. Your feedback is therefore very important to us so please keep it coming!
Just for reference too, the thread you all initially posted in is here. You should still all be subscribed there, just mentioning the thread as an FYI if needed.
If you need anything, please give me a nudge here and I'd be happy to help.
Have a great day ahead!
I'm now doing all web development outside of my Dropbox folder, and have an rsync script watching my web dev folder to copy files BACK into the Dropbox folder (ignoring node_modules and other files I don't want clogging up my Dropbox account and resources). And I know this is not a solution that will work for everyone especially considering it takes up extra space on my hard drive. But that's what I've had to resort to, adding to the many other war stories on this thread.
I use Selective Sync to offload big files to Dropbox, which works fine, except it completely removes the folder from my local computer. I would completely forget the folder is there because I don't see it (I'm aware I could be using the "Smart Sync" feature, but I do not like it ... it can be a disaster if you have to copy files over to a new hard drive).
Therefore when I use Selective Sync, I usually create a folder locally with the same name as the one I just offloaded, thus creating a folder on my computer with the "little gray minus icon". Which tells me that "this folder is on Dropbox".
With the new ignore feature, things are a bit more complex. My new process is:
- Make folder
- Move big files into folder
- Uncheck folder via selective sync and wait for process to complete
- Create folder with same name
- Dropbox will rename folder with (Selective Sync Conflict)
- Do terminal command: xattr -w com.dropbox.ignored 1 /Volumes/Storage/Dropbox/. . . /Your Folder Name
- Rename local folder with same name as remote folder
Not sure if this makes any sense at all, but this is my experience, and obviously it could be less complex. In any case, not sure why we're beating around the bush with long stories such as mine. Other people have already offered a decent solution for situation:
Dropbox needs a way to globally and locally ignore files. And if something gets ignored, it LITERALLY gets ignored ... Removed from remote Dropbox. No folder renaming. No syncing. No indexing. Dropbox leaves it on the local computer and walks away.
Hi all, just gave the beta ignore feature a try. All it seems to do is put a little grey icon on my file.
If I create a file with the same name in the same folder on another machine, I get an '(Ignored Item Conflict)' on the first machine. I thought the whole point was that files set to ignore didn't sync...
- We want gitignore-like solution, not a command that needs a specific path.
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.
