Add .dropboxignore directory to exclude folders without using selective sync

[Tom_M]

Please please please can you add a feature that allows folders to be excluded from the Dropbox account (on windows and mac). For sure I'm not the first person to request this, but I'm yet to find a good explanation of why it's not there. A quick google search reveals loads of people also looking for the same feature. I really like the workflow I have with dropbox, but it's getting to the point where I might switch providers in order to allow better selective sync.

I've seen hackish solutions using selective sync, but it would be great if this could be done in one of the following ways:
- global pattern matching eg "node_modules"
- a marker file in the directory like .dropboxignore
- a simple right click context menu "Ignore this folder"

Other than that, keep up the good work. Cheers.
Tom

[Emma]

Hi folks, 

Thanks for your feedback on this.
While ignored files delivers for some of the use cases here, I appreciate it does not for all. 
We'll be taking another review of this thread to isolate use cases for a .dropboxignore file feature in particular.

I've updated the status and we'll take this to the product team.
As a side note, it would be helpful for us if you could outline the gap between what ignored files offers, and what a .dropboxignore file feature would add to your workflows.

Thank you.

[sam m.]

Why won't Dropbox add a feature where you could automatically ignore files by name? I realize that this is a little bit of a niche feature, probably only needed by power users, but it would clearly be trivial to implement, and I've seen many users asking for this feature.

https://twitter.com/stormchild/status/453914697536794624
https://github.com/tkonolige/dbignore
http://superuser.com/questions/731583/can-i-specify-certain-files-for-dropbox-to-ignore
http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/35474/does-dropbox-or-any-other-similar-solution-ignore-f...
http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Dropbox-add-option-to-exclude-files-by-filetype-extension
https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/201289669-Ignore-folder-without-selecti...

You get the idea, several pages of Google results with people asking for a feature that would take probably less than a week for an engineer to implement.

[Mark]

"Clearly trivial to implement"

One of my favourite lines on the forums....

You could of course always write it yourself via the API if its so trivial?

[Peter G.5]

+1 I guess I will consider switching to some open source solution ot btsync if this won't be solved, others have ignore files and work quite well

[sam m.]

+1

[Lauri I.]

Recently I started experiencing the problem that when I save images or files from chrome to dropbox, there are ghost crdownload files also that do not dissapear even when the download is complete.

I guess the problem is that when I download a photo.jpg, it immediatelly syncs the photo.crdownload to the cloud and somehow it's not able to delete it soon enough?

Any way to get dropbox to ignore these files and not sync them? Or does someone know how to disable this feature from chrome so that there wont be any crdownload temp files?

[Metalworks M.]

+1000

"Unsync this folder" as a context menu add-on is a no-brainer.

Leaving an Alias behind, greye out, would be a perfect reminder that it's still there.

[Peter G.5]

I was looking for a workaround and there are few, if you can limit yourself to linux or mac, but ultimately went with bittorrent sync ... http://peter.grman.at/ignore-node_modules-in-dropbox/

[Louis M.]

Yes, this would be a step closer to making Dropbox a genuine version control alternative.

Not synching certain filetypes isnt the same - omission of feature X doesnt mean feature Y included.

I'm no expert, but this feature is included in either the frontend, or as a loose text file in the same folder which just list the file types to ignore.

Does this feature exist already in the business version?

I work in games, and engines produce a lot of guff which is either useless or harmful to other users of the same folder. 'Fix the engine' is one option, but needless traffic produced by, for example the OS (for example, .tmp files as mentioned in the header) is prohibitive to users on limited bandwidth as well.

I like Dropbox. Being able to exclude the garbage would make me like it more 🙂

[Laurent D.2]

+1000

[Erwin M.]

I also desperately would like this feature. It would save money to Dropbox as it would not have to continuously synchronize and keep unlimited backups of temporary files each time I do a compilation in Visual Studio for example.
I totally agree with you that it is very trivial to implement.

Of course we could do it ourselves IF there was any API to hack with, but there is none for the Windows Desktop client. And the CLI interface on Linux is very limited. Having to build an alternative desktop client (assuming it were possible without sacrificing a lot of other features) just for this feature would be ridiculous. Ideally Dropbox could release the client as open source so we could tinker with it.

I have lost all hope in this matter, considering how they shut down Votebox a while ago and have not implemented any new feature for a long time (not even fixing certain bugs).