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...
Sigh... and if it wasnt bad enough... now this:
It seems even if you do manage to set the folder on ignore, dropbox doesnt "really" ignore it, it just does not "upload/sync" it, but it still indexes it and tries to read/sync any files in it.
So say, if you have a folder called "GITHUB TESTS" and set it on ignore, then dump 750,000 files in there, to test something out, your dropbox will take 3-7 days or more to "index" them all, meanwhile blocking any meaningfull or important syncs from happening until its done
And if any of the files in there is an exe or dll, or anything that the OS locks, then good luck, because that file will cause dropbox to "hang" saying "unable to sync XX file, its in use" and hanging your entire queue until you unlock that file, also preventing any further files from syncing.
Soo.. were back to square one negative selective sync.. and the fact this issue has been known for 6 months snd has not been addressed even tho its probably a simple fix does not bring me any confort.
Cmon guys were trying to be loyal, but you are not helping us here... Dropbox keeps getting worse.. not better, its trying to become easier for "normal" people to use, while forgetting its the sys admins of the world that make the purchasing desicions, if i wanted it more "dumbified" id just switch to google drive, the only true "upgrade" to dropbox in the past 3 years was it doesnt take 3 days now to show all the files in selective sync but other than that you have added a ton of features that do not make this better.
Here in my office all my users keep complaining and asking why are we still hanging with dropbox and not moving to onedrive like "normal corporate people" and every time I keep defending dropbox because its a "real" advanced hard drive syncing service vs just a file/folder syncing service but every day it gets harder to defend it.
Were paying $1250 a month here, my users are angry, at some point the dam is going to break, its unsustainable, please help us help you, if you just "ignore" us for 6 months, and we just "ignore" them as well hoping someday you guys will fix it, I will be the one replaced and dropbox along with me in short order.
Just wanted to put this out there.
If we had never had this feature in the first place i would understand it, it wouldnt be a problem but since it was working fine before with selective sync remove and now it does not, my users here are up in arms, you cannot remove a service breaking feature for a user without providing a suitable replacement, or at least a workaround, its just bad customer care.
lll hold on as long as I can and hope you make a fix soon, but if it does not come soon enough i do think this will definitely be a deal breaker here for my users and they will force me to switch services, i know you hear this a thousand times here, but im just trying to state a fact, im not being melodramatic.
Thanks for reading all of this, i hope it explains a little bit why some of us are frustrated with this.
Ok so ive found a workaround... its not .. fun... and i do not recomend it unless you exactly know what you are doing and its going to cause all sorts of problems and in general its a bad idea, but it does the job, sort of.
Its based on this:
https://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/154423-block-applcation-access-folder.html
Essentially you have to edit dropboxes windows execution permissions so it runs on its own user, a user which has only access to read/write its own EXE folders, some windows folders and the dropbox storage folder, once thats done you set them to ignore then block access to the folders you do not want to sync.
Dropbox now throws all sorts of errors but it "works" it now properly ignores that folder because it cannot read it due to permissions, however you on your computer can work normally on it.
Definitely not the kind of solution i expected but at least its working.
The provided solution with com.dropbox.ignored flags are not without issues.
1. On computer A, I build an app and it creates node_modules. That folder gets synced to my other computers.
2. I ignore the folder on computer A, and the folder gets deleted from the other computers.
3. Now I do a build on computer B. That creates node_modules on computer B, and now that folder now gets synchronized to my other computers. But that results in the existing folder on computer A is being renamed "node_modules (Ignored in conflict)".
4. I can now ignore node_modules on computer B and the folder disappears on my other computers.
5. I now have to rename the folder on computer A back to node_modules.
If Dropbox had listened to its customers and just created a git style .ignorefolders kind of file, everything would have been much easier. And lets face it. This is mostly an option for computer professionals anyway.
We really need some way to ignore folders/files based on path that is stored in place like dbignore file or something similar.
It's needed because there are many cases when user or some app need delete and/or recreate these folders/files.
At this moment 'ignore' function works only until the folder is deleted and created again.
I'm not here to say anything new, just to turn up the volume a little on previous comments:
I would also like the ability to ignore all current and future node_modules folders by pattern in a .dropboxignore file à la .gitignore. Just adding the com.dropbox.ignored attribute to node_modules folders in a dozen projects cut my file count by about 100,000. Also, folders like node_modules and build folders tend to be created and deleted often, so we're wasting a lot of system resources to sync something we don't even want synced.
