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.

[borkdude]

Hi Daphne,

I have already tried this, but it didn't work. That's why I asked if I could be enrolled. I really need this. Right now I have to just turn off Dropbox. Delete folder. And then turn it back on. It's really not a pleasant way of working. 

[Sam_Buss]

When is this feature going to be available. It is "accepted", but the discussion is five years old!  I need this rather badly.

[ariya_mms]

Add this feature to the Linux client too, please.

[Arno K.]

I'm also looking forward to this option.

It is essential for me to sync my webdevelopment projects with DropBox, but they only need to be synced partially.
Now I have over 500.000!! extra files which dont's need to be synced (or only once in a while), but are a pain to manually deselect in the selective sync section.
It's taking a huge amount of space and slows down my computer A LOT.

[Alexander16]

I think the suggestion https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox-ideas/Selective-Sync-Ignore-new-Folder-Events/idi-p/400058 should also be incorporated in this update.   I continually get folders created by users that I have no interest and being able to have an option to ignore new folder creation events would be very helpful.  

Quite often I am not aware of these folders being created and only learn of it after I get disc full errors.

[israelshmueli]

It seems the feature  currently exists. See https://help.dropbox.com/files-folders/restore-delete/ignored-files

[nickyhajal]

It just barely exists, and many commenters above have brought up issues with that proposed solution.

What we actually need is the ability to tell the Dropbox indexer patterns to ignore itself so that it can stop trying to process all files like, "node_modules", "vendor", "build", etc. that don't need to be synced.

[totesmagotes]

I’ve already switched to Sync. Not only does it have this feature in an easy to use GUI, it’s less expensive. Even the free tier offers 5GB to Dropbox’s 2GB.

[stirredo]

I have now moved on to tresoreit.com which has this featured built-in. It's almost the same price as dropbox and the desktop client doesn't seem to hog any CPU or RAM on my computer.

I followed the guide on this page:

https://support.tresorit.com/hc/en-us/articles/217103697-Exclude-specific-file-types-from-sync-advan...

and I was able to ignore folders like node_modules and vendor (PHP packages folder).

It's a shame dropbox has decided to pivot from a cloud-based backup tool to what seems like a path to being an email client with google docs built-in.

It's been 6 years since this feature request was created and it clearly tells us where their priorities lie now, which was from being a file backup tool to now being google docs with half-baked file-backup utility built-in.

So long, Dropbox

[mweirauch]

Hi everybody. As I am sharing quite some development projects in my Dropbox, I am facing the very same issues especially with folders which are deleted and re-created by build tools. I just published a first release of my little helper:

https://github.com/mweirauch/dropignore

It's a cross-platform command line application which allows you to configure a set of patterns to look for and ignore them if matching with the extended attribute method. I am only using it on a Linux distribution. MacOS and Windows builds are there, but haven't been tested except for integration tests.

Hope it's useful to someone.

PS: Please consult the README and search any open or closed issues before posting a new bug.

PPS: Please refrain from posting questions in the issue tracker. Thanks!