Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

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...

A nasty trick that helps is to create a directory with the filename of the file you wish to ignore, then use selective sync to remove it and then any normal file with that same name is ignored. Unfortunately, you need to do this with a lot of mouse clicks, "dropox exclude" does not seem to work. It's really sad I need to do this shit on something that should be technically easy to implement, even if just for linux users...

This would be really helpful for me for some of the projects I work on where I want to be able to pick it up on one computer and later another without having to commit to my git repository. As it stands .node_module folders get uploaded and the paths get so long they can't be synced and dropbox freezes up. Then the computer starts getting upset. I'd be happy with it being an advanced only feature. Maybe a .dropboxignore file in the directory to set folders and files to ignore? Much the same way .gitignore works?

Good points guys, this thread has been discussed in another thread in more detail here:

https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201529949-Why-won-t-Dropbox-add-a-gitignore-like-feature- 

I'm not sure why this is marked as "Answered", when it clearly isn't.

Hi Jake,

The Dropbox desktop client is designed to sync everything in your Dropbox folder. If you don't want it to sync something, just move it out of your Dropbox folder. Please bear in mind as well that we only actually upload unique files once, so if you move a large file elsewhere in your Dropbox, or move it out then back in again, all that will happen is that it will need to reindex in its new location, not be uploaded to our servers.

Hope this helps!

Come on guys, stop thinking small. Why shouldn't I be able to sync my entire home directory and be done with backups forever and have access to any one small pdf hidden somewhere in the attick on my disk from my phone without having to a a conscious effort to think what I might need? You can make this work on linux with a single soft link but then it also wants to sync huge temporary data files. I want file opt-out, not opt-in.

My research includes sometimes generating files that are large and I don't need to sync (12GB+). More often than not, I just need them for a little while and then a new similar file is generated. This keeps my DB in a constant not syncing state but I do need to keep my code synced. Because the code is being used in different computers and settings with different privileges, generated file must be within the code's parent folder.

I can live with the unnecessary syncing of all the compilation generated files that my IDE creates, but a .dropboxignore file (or any other means to exclude particular files and file patterns) would definitely be so useful.

An exclude option comes with the CLI for Linux, why isn't there a similar thing for Windows?