The ignore folder feature is not working.

[rjclardy]

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]

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. 

 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! 

[rjclardy]

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...

1. Created a new, empty folder named "foobar".
2. Marked it as ignored and waited for the Dropbox app to finish syncing.
   1. Confirmed that the icon was changed to a gray minus sign and that the folder isn't on other devices.
3. Added a new file named "foo.txt" to the ignored folder.
   1. At this point, I see the Dropbox icon start spinning and it says it is "Syncing foo.txt..."
   2. I then confirmed that the file's icon was a gray minus sign and the file wasn't added to other devices.
4. Edited the foo.txt file.
   1. Again, I saw the icon start spinning and Dropbox said it was syncing a file.
   2. Again, confirmed that the file wasn't added to other devices.
5. Removed the foo.txt file.
   1. 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? 

[rjclardy]

Sure. I'm using v87.4.138.

[Jane]

Thanks for keeping in touch here @rjclardy; it’s Jane this time!

I’ve sent you a brief message through our support system following-up from your discussion with Fiona here. Please have a look at your inbox when you have some spare time & we’ll take it from there to see if what you’re experiencing is expected in any way &/or if there’a a way to improve that. 

I look forward to hearing back from you!

[leonardacs]

I have the same problem too, in Ubuntu 18.04, v87.4.138.

In the previous version, this feature worked perfectly.

Any solution?

[Fiona]

Thanks for reporting and for the additional information @leonardacs. 

I would like to check a few things that are related to device details. Is it OK if I email you to investigate before we suggest a solution? 

Thank you! 

[XionicFire]

Guys youve known about this for six months, this problem is still up, we need a fix, its a useability breaking problem, and im on windows using a business license with 100 users, not linux.

Before you guys decided to make mandatory that dropbox cannot selective sync and ignore a folder i could just selective sync it away, create it and all would be well, but you removed that and now im forced to hack/modify stuff to try to get my work done.

You added the ignore function and i said ok they broke something but they added a workaround, not ideal but ok, however it still checks for any files inside the folder for changes.. every..single...time... , and takes the same amount of time as if i had synced them, might as well just let it do it.

It doesnt TRULLY ignore the folder, and its a folder that continuously handles hundreds of thousands of files, our github repository log file folder contains 756,000+ files... i do not need to dropbox those files, nor to "index" them... thanks to you I can no longer selective sync it away, because i need to be able to see those logs, and i cannot remove the folder from dropbox because others need it synced in real time , every time our database decides to create dump logs or compile logs, my dropbox becomes unusable, i have to CTRL-ALT-DEL  hard close it, and restart it, sometimes it ignores the files, other times it does not and i need to reset my machine

I set this folder on ignore specifically for this purpose.

Also, while the program is running, even tho the databases EXE file is clearly marked as ignore, dropbox tries to sync it, and says "unable to sync XXXX.EXE, file is in use", hanging all my other sync queue files until i close the database, this is just ridiculous.

Please fix this, its not that complicated.

If folder/file has ignore file then dont sync AND do not include this file/folder in the indexing database, its not rocket science.

[Ravenix83]

I'm having this exact issue. Dropbox still tries to interrogate ignored files before deciding not to do anything with them. If I've marked a folder to be ignored, I would expect no Dropbox activity to take place in that folder or its subfolders. This is causing a major headache as alot of temporary files are written to this location and Dropbox is interfering/monitoring these files despite being flagged as ignore.

For clarity it pertains to folders which have been flagged as ignored via folder attributes. e.g. via powershell

Set-Content -Path 'Full\Path\Here'  -Stream com.dropbox.ignored -Value 1

 This is as per https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/ignored-files