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.

[nei a.]

well, I can tell you it is more than 8 years, since it has been first requsted to get an option to exclude files/folders (this was in the old forum before this one, might have been even earlier, it was for sure before the votebox interlude)
anyway, at that time Arash made a comment they have it internally, in it will soon be public, well there we are many many many years later, and still nothing
(luckly for dropbox the forum is gone, so we cannot show them for how long this is outstanding)

[cabreu]

I'm aghast that this is not possible. More than that, for years I have used the selective sync hack to reproduce this behavior but a few days ago I started having Selective Sync Conflicts

[carlbrusse]

There are so many threads on this, and the recent changes which have removed the workaround, but apparently it is all 'solved'...

e.g.

https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Files-folders/How-to-manually-stop-sync-of-a-folder-but-still-retain...

[miromannino]

@carlbrusse I always did as explained in the solution in that link you wrote and it seems there are no issues.

For example I have a project MyProject, where inside there are several folders and files. Among these there is the infamous node_modules folder.

I copy on my desktop the node_modules and I let Dropbox sync that the node_modules folder is gone.

I create a folder inside MyProject called node_modules and I let Dropbox to sync again.

Then I do selective sync removing node_modules from synced files

Now I copy back the node_modules in my desktop where it was before inside MyProject folder.

This process is very annoying but at least seems to work still. And I don't usually create new projects every other day so for me is still reasonable.

Can you confirm that works? Which OS?

PS. When I install packages (change the node_modules folder files) Dropbox still uses 100% CPU for a while though since is calculating differences. Dropbox, this should be optimised, it's very very annoying.

[undegroundalien]

After recommendations from other people in this thread, I've finally decided to try pCloud.

It's an amazing service. It's all I wanted in a virtual drive service, without any of the garbage.

It automatically creates a virtual drive that contains files and folders (without taking local space). Uploads and downloads are super fast, without any of the extremely slow starting/sync times DropBox has given me (even though I have 600mb there, more than DropBox). This has all worked much better than DropBox's Smart Sync.

The kicker is: it comes with global file ignoring by pattern by default. Something that DropBox can't find the time or the will to implement, even after years of requests, is a default feature...

And if anything, the lack of certain features like document-ending (i.e. DropBox Paper) mean to me that pCloud is focused in providing the best virtual file experience for users than actually need it, rather than trying to expand the business horizontally and letting the virtual file service features mummify over time.

I've started migrating all my stuff to pCloud. So far I don't see any downside, and I'm happy to support a small company trying to do one thing right. It'll take a few months for me to do the transition (and I still have some time left on my DropBox paid tier anyway) but I'm very happy so far.

So, you know, just ignore this thread's requests as you have, DropBox. On a long enough timeline, it won't matter.

[Eric G.11]

For those of you liking pCloud. I found that for the ignore to work you need to have the folder being used outside of pCloud and then you use the sync to bring it in. 
So your really not working directly off of your cloud drive. 
you end up having to download the folder off of pCloud to work on it. 

[Daphne]

Hi there everyone, just wanted to update you with some good news!

We're currently working on a feature to allow you to ignore local folders from syncing with your Dropbox account.

At the moment, this is currently in beta so isn't available to all users, but we're working hard to roll this out to more users in the future.

You can find the steps along with some additional info on this from here.

Thank you all for showing your interest in this!

[cabreu]

[sagarisms]

In addition to all the valuable comments above, I simply do not undersrtand why Dropbox cannot retain entire folder structures & filenames locally while not actually hosting the file on the local computer?

It is just bad UX.

A lot of individuals are refraining from using the internet to focus on getting work done even though they might be technically connected in the background. From an experience perspective it is rather cumbersome to go to the browser each time one even needs to look up a file.

Allowing to access one's entire folder & file view locally, as part of OS finder/filemanager view is extremely helpful, even if they are not hosted locally.

[sgttwld]

@Daphne Really? Now that I just cancelled my Dropbox subscription? Wow, what a coincidence! Haha, I guess I have to reconsider... although it will be hard to trade in 1GB of ram again just for the dropbox client running...