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Forum Discussion
Stop Selective Sync from auto syncing newly added files by default
Hi all - I am the creative director at a small creative studio and Dropbox's selective sync feature is a great way for our team to have the seamless experience of working with our files locally, whether they are in-studio or remote.
However, there is a catch to this feature that stops it from being as efficient as advertised. Our file structure is very standard - Year / Client / Project. Team members will use selective sync to only sync the projects they are actively working on so that they do not blow up their local hard drives with 3-4TB of data. However, whenever someone adds a new folder anywhere along the directory chain, that new folder is auto-synced to everyone's desktop, by default. So even though a team member may only want select project files that are relevant to them, they are forced into any new files that others on the team are added since they last set their syncing preferences.
Unless I'm missing something there is no current setting to change this, making local file management super messy. Each team member has to constantly go into preferences to deselect projects they don't want.
TL;DR - Selective sync auto sync new folders and files, team-wide resulting in messy local file management.
My question is: If this is truly selective sync, why is this the default functionally? Shouldn't there at least be a way to switch it off in preferences? Or am I missing something?
- Rich
Super User II
GeneratorCreative wrote:
If this is truly selective sync, why is this the default functionally? Shouldn't there at least be a way to switch it off in preferences? Or am I missing something?
You're not missing anything. There's no option to prevent new folders from syncing down to a computer. A folder cannot be unchecked in Selective Sync until it has synced to the computer.
However, if you're on a PC, you can specify that new folders sync down to the computer marked as Online-only, so they don't take up any disk space. That's the only option there is.
