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.

[Antoni A.]

It will be so useful if I could exclude certain files from syncing based on a file mask. Examples:
.tmp
*.xml~
mailbox.psd
aa.t??

[Christopher N.1]

Hi there,

Thanks very much for your feedback. At present, there are only a few file types that don't sync to your Dropbox account. See this Help Centre article for more information:

https://help.dropbox.com/syncing-uploads/files-not-syncing

If there are other files you don't want to sync to your Dropbox, I'd just recommend storing them outside your Dropbox folder.

Hope this helps!

[Kaue G.]

I am looking for this feature too, Node Modules take too much space and its not needed, I am already searching for a better alternative.

[Cwood]

I am looking for this feature too! like .dropboxignore regex!

[Mark Cerqueira]

I have my iTunes folder in my Dropbox. It makes no sense to sync iTunes Library.xml since that isn't used by iTunes (it only uses iTunes Library.itl). But I am unable to configure Dropbox to simply ignore iTunes Library.xml.

[Mark Cerqueira]

You can "hack" file ignore by tricking Dropbox by first setting up a folder with the same name as the file you want to ignore. Check out the instructions here: http://superuser.com/a/757498

It'd still be nice to have this natively built in though.

[sam a.]

+1

[Rob C.5]

+1

[peterj]

The range of temporary files ignored by Dropbox needs to include filenames matching "Unconfirmed*.crdownload". This is the filename assigned by Google when downloading a file and it is renamed to the correct name when download is complete.

Dropbox already ignores certain temporary files created by Microsoft Office, but it should also ignore temporary files from other applications such as Google Chrome. One way would be to give user's the option the add certain filenames to be ignored so that user's can do this themselves.

[Douglas M.]

+1