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Forum Discussion
The ignore folder feature is not working.
I can confirm that I'm seeing the same behavior that cabreu described: ignored folders don't get synced BUT the dropbox app continues to monitor them anyway and performs some level of processing whenever files are added/removed/edited from inside ignored folders 😩
Unfortunately this all but defeats the purpose of an "ignore" feature for many of us. We need dropbox to truly ignore (i.e. do not react to changes within) certain folders to preserve system resources.
- Fiona
Dropbox Staff
Hello rjclardy.
I created a new topic for discussion for you and cabreu., to answer to your question.
Let's see why files could be syncing while ignored. The ignore folder feature, has the file/folder you chose Dropbox to ingore, synced to the device you set this up with, but will remove it from dropbox.com or any other devices you have.
Syncing is expected for this folder to be removed from your other devices. Is this the syncing you are referring to?
You can find all the information you need for this beta Dropbox syncing feature below.
:books: How to set a Dropbox file to be ignored
Let me know what you see syncing exactly and any other questions you might have.
Thank you!
Thanks for responding! But no, I'm not talking about the syncing responsible for removing the folder from other devices. Here are the steps I took...
- Created a new, empty folder named "foobar".
- Marked it as ignored and waited for the Dropbox app to finish syncing.
- Confirmed that the icon was changed to a gray minus sign and that the folder isn't on other devices.
- Added a new file named "foo.txt" to the ignored folder.
- At this point, I see the Dropbox icon start spinning and it says it is "Syncing foo.txt..."
- I then confirmed that the file's icon was a gray minus sign and the file wasn't added to other devices.
- Edited the foo.txt file.
- Again, I saw the icon start spinning and Dropbox said it was syncing a file.
- Again, confirmed that the file wasn't added to other devices.
- Removed the foo.txt file.
- Again, I saw the icon start spinning and Dropbox said it was syncing a file.
So the new feature is properly preventing ignored files/folders from being synced to other devices... but the Dropbox app still reacts to the fact that something changed inside the ignored folder. I can't tell for sure obviously, but it looks like it processes the file that was changed and then decides not to sync it to other devices — instead of actually ignoring any changes within the ignored folder altogether.
So this feature seems to be more of a "do not sync this folder to other devices" feature instead of an "ignore this folder" feature.
And unfortunately, it looks like that won't solve the scenario that many of us have been requesting this feature for. I'm a software developer and there are often folders that have thousands of files in them that get updated very frequently while I'm developing. When Dropbox tries to process all of those changes it eats up a ton of my computer's resources. So what I need is to be able to tell Dropbox to completely ignore a folder by not monitoring/processing any changes that happen to the files inside of it.
- Fiona
I so very much appreciate your feedback about this beta feature of ours rjclardy.
Would it be OK if I send you an email to get some visuals of this behavior, a screencast reproducing the issue you are facing to have a further look into this?
What version of the desktop app, do you have installed there?
