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...
It will be so useful if I could exclude certain files from syncing based on a file mask. Examples:
.tmp
*.xml~
mailbox.psd
aa.t??
I would love an advanced feature similar to that of .hgignore and .gitingore: A simple (hidden) file placable in (at least) the root directory for dropbox where I can specify grep-patterns for folders and files to ignore.
By making it a hidden file with regex-patterns, it automatically becomes an "advanced" feature, only available for those who understand what it is and how to use it.I am loving Dropbox more and more. My use-case/need:
I do cross-platform development (Win/Mac) using an IDE (Intellij), and I have simply put my projects in dropbox, so I can do development and testing across machines/plattforms. This works very well for me, actually. But since IDE layouts and SDK-settings are specified in project-files, I have to close the IDE on one machine Before opening it on another. Otherwise the IDEs start battling over the settings-files. Also, I have to change the SDK-links every time I go from one to the other.
But if I could simply put a line in a ".dropboxignore"-file saying to ignore certain files, that would be wonderful!Another repeat of an existing (and much asked for) feature. Come on, DropBox -- Respond already!
I know many user suggested this idea before, but clearly they haven't got real answers, so I reissue this:
Why won't Dropbox implements the .dropboxignore/.dbignore feature?
It would be really convenient to have some sort of ".gitigrore"-like feature. This is really not so big deal to implement (just some regex tricks), and so many users have been asking for this.
No, we (the group of users asking for this feature) don't want to get the "Use the selective sync feature", because it works only on folders, and when a new one created it needs to be checked from the menu manually, It's just a pain in the ***. We want a real .dropboxignore feature, not a workaround!
- Mark
Super User II
If it isnt 'a not so big deal' to implement why not do it yourself via the API?
There should be a way to regex match certain files and just ignore them in update. I though it is a great idea to sync my main work folder, but now various massive files that are trivial to regenerate gets synched and dropbox is constantly updating and chumming moving hundreds of megabytes around. There are hacks around that, but I'm just not very excited. It is a very basic functionality to have!
I reiterate the screaming in the same direction. Please Dropbox add a feature (.dropboxignore or any other technical solution!) to exclude single files or whole file types from syncing. This would bring you at pair of some of your competitors, such as Carbonite, which allow syncing "preferences" at the single file level.
Many linux text editors, IDEs and many more programs create temporary and "junk" files that should not be synced. Regex excluding would be really appreciated.
I need this feature too, AutoCAD for example creates .bak files (backup files) in the same directory of the source file, so Dropbox is uploading these .bak files all the time...
I use Dropbox for syncing my development project files but every time all the libraries are uploaded to Dropbox which increases the size of the project by a huge margin.
It would be very helpful if there is a file like .gitignore implementation for Dropbox sync which will ignore files to be uploaded.
Please implement this feature in the upcoming version, it would be a great help for all of them in the developer community.
Dropbox has already implemented selective sync in the desktop client so this might not be a very difficult task for Dropbox.
Hi @ashutoshw3. I simple use MegaSync.
The Desktop App is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
And Yes. You can define recursive exclusions just like in .gitignore.
Another feature that was decisive in my choice is the ability to watch one or more directories that are outside the main sync folder.
Example: Documents, Music, etc ... Individually, without moving them to the main sync directory.If Dropbox implements at least these 2 features I'll be using it again.
this would be a great thing. for example firefox and thunderbird create a file named parent.lock which is necessary for normal the operation of firefox or thunderbird. dropbox isn't able to sync while those files exist. the files normally are deleted when ff or tb are closed and all processes are stopped. but in some reason they remain till reboot. there is no need for those files to be synced. there a mask for adding exclusions would be very helpful
Its been 3 years people, please add this feature, im not sure why its so complicated.
This along with renaming the dropbox folder to something else and my WORK PHONE to be able to upload WORK RELATED images into the BUSINESS FOLDER are sorely needed features.
In windows while having the dropbox named ( company name) sure sounded like a nice idea when you came up with it basically eats up a LOT of characters from the windows 255 character limit, and its unnacceptable, we have over 6 TB of data sored on the dropbox across 25 machines, while it wont matter to small users, its majorly cripling our coding operation.
To everyone here, I have managed 2 workarounds for these problems so far but every new version gets harder and harder to "fool" dropbox to make this workarounds work, and some of the workarounds dont work as well as wed like (the folder one you cannot create folders starting with . in windows, and cannot exclude hashtag files like *.tmp files or things like that) or are just plain ridiculous
To ignore a file:
Turn off the app that is locking the file, move the file somwehere else, create a folder with the EXACT same name as the file, go into selective sync exclude that folder, wait for dropbox to delete it, when dropbox finishes synching move the file back, it will be ignored from here on.
To rename dropbox to C:\Dropbox or D:\Dropbox.
Grab dropbox 2.4 old version offline installer, you can download it from the dropbox website in the archival area, you can only find this through google search, which is the last version that worked before they did the great dumbass idea to forcefully rename the dropbox folder.
Move your dropbox folder somewhere,
Go to Appdata / roaming / dropbox, delete everything there, (back it up first if you like)
Install 2.4, login to your dropbox account, as soon as you are logged in, hit pause, change your dropbox directory from C:\%userpath%\documents to C:\Dropbox, accept dropbox dialog saying its ok to move the files, once it finishes close dropbox, go to the C folder, create a folder called Dropbox (yourcompanyname) and remove all access permisions to the folder with windows security settings, this will ensure dropbox cant rename your dropbox folder again when you upgrade automatically, and yes if you ever give access to your account to this folder dropbox will automatically rename your dropbox folder without asking you, dropbox is CONSTANTLY trying to rename this folder non stop, and it pisses me off but not much you can do, as a backup i recomend you also add a folder just like this one to C:\%userpath%\documents just in case dropbox decides to move it back later. this way at least hes screwed and cant change your folder name to anything but dropbox because he PHISICALLY CANT, it gives you a little wiggle room for future versions changes or if someone at dropbox gets "creative" again with your file organization with zero regard to the implications of their desicions on their customers.
Once this is done, turn dropbox on again, and hit resume synching, dropbox will update to the newest version and you will keep your dropbox folder where you want it (C:\Dropbox)
Weve had some problems with 3.14.7 that it logs you out whenever it upgrades from a very old version but we found a workaround upgrading manually to version 3.12.4 first using the offline installer, and then letting that one upgrade automatically to 3.14.7, and it works fine.
if you ever want to keep using your dropbox on the same folder on a new machine, repeat the create locked permissions folder steps, install dropbox with offline installer preferably not newer than 3.12.4 and copy the roaming dropbox folder from the old machine to the new machine after you install it, and after relinking your account again you should still keep the dropbox location where you want it.
If by now you are not going insane good for you, the point of all this was to show you just to how dumb and ridiculous this has gotten with the workarounds to get features that should have been included in the first place.
Dear Dropbox, PEOPLE THAT WORK AND USE DROPBOX FOR SERIOUS BUSINESS NEED TO RENAME WHERE THEIR FILES ARE FOR A MULTITUDE OF REASONS, NO, A SYMLINK WONT DO, PLEASE ADD THIS FEATURE, its been 3 years now, please, this is getting ridiculous.
I hope these workarounds helped someone.
There are many scenarios in which an application adds little hidden files to a folder, which should be considered local metadata and not synced to other computers.
For example:
- folder thumbnail database (added by some file managers)
- folder view settings file (added by some file managers)
- lock files (temporarily added by some software like RStudio)
- ...
Instead of providing a general solution to this problem, Dropbox currently hard-codes a small selection of such filenames to exclude from syncing:
- desktop.ini
- thumbs.db
- .ds_store
- icon\r
- .dropbox
- .dropbox.attr
This covers the metadata files added by the default file managers on Windows and Mac and by Dropbox itself, but not those added by other kinds of programs like RStudio and by third-party or Linux file managers.
Please provide a more general solution!
Other file syncing software has supported this for ages: For example, git allows users to specify a custom list of filenames to exclude in .gitignore.
If adding such a feature to the Dropbox UI is too much work, then make it so that we e.g. manually have to edit the .dropbox file to specify what filenames to exclude. That's fine. But please do add this feature one way or another!
+1 Absolutely! Being able to exclude
.git
directories especially would save a lot of headaches, since they can be very large relative to the normal folder contents and are likely to already be backed up GitHub anyway!
I have my iTunes folder in my Dropbox. It makes no sense to sync iTunes Library.xml since that isn't used by iTunes (it only uses iTunes Library.itl). But I am unable to configure Dropbox to simply ignore iTunes Library.xml.
You can "hack" file ignore by tricking Dropbox by first setting up a folder with the same name as the file you want to ignore. Check out the instructions here: http://superuser.com/a/757498
It'd still be nice to have this natively built in though.
An example where this is useful if not completely needed, is sharing a DropBox folder between Mac and Windows on the same machine. I am not talking about having two instances of DropBox running--one in Windows, the other in Mac--pointing to the same folder as I have seen that completely mess up the dropbox folder with lost files and such. I am talking about having one 'side' running the software and controlling all syncing with the service from its own Dropbox folder, then having the other side just access the folder directly as if it were any other folder shared between the Mac and Windows.
The problem is since Mac and Windows store hidden/temp files differently, inevitably the client is syncing a bunch of things it shouldn't be. In my case, my DropBox folder is now littered with files all starting with a period.
Specifically in my setup, I run OS X Yosemite as my primary OS so it has Dropbox set up syncing to a folder under my user's home directory. I then run Parallels Desktop to run Windows, but thanks to shared folders, I can see my Mac user's home folders, and thus I can access the Dropbox folder from Windows. Even when I make changes to the folder from the Windows side, the client on the Mac side, monitoring that same folder syncs all changes to the cloud. Again, to be clear, the Windows side has no idea of anything called Dropbox. It's just accessing a shared folder from the Mac side.
The problem is because of this setup, my DropBox folder is now littered with almost double the number of files because for every actual file, there's a corresponding 'dummy' file with the same name and extension but with a leading period. Here's an example...
.MyNotes.txt
.SomeFile.pdf
MyNotes.txt
SomeFile.pdf
The first two share the same filenames and extensions as the latter two but start with a period.
Since *I* know I'll never create a file that starts with a period, I want to exclude them from DropBox, but I can't, so instead I just have all these files littered throughout my DropBox store getting synced to *all* my machines and devices. Worse, since the file extensions are still the same, all clients think they are jpgs, pdfs, etc. and display them as bad data.
The only solution is to set up *two* dropbox stores, one on the Mac and one on Windows but that would mean I am literally doubling the storage space.
It would be great if files you didn't want to sync could be specified in a .dropboxignore file, with something like a .gitignore syntax. Or, even better -- develop a standard (e.g. .nosync) that others companies and syncing services could implement as well.
.dropboxignore copying .gitignore would be great. Then I could exclude all these weird indesign temp-files I don't need. And the same for whatever the next software making weird temp-files is.
