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.

[Alexandr M.]

At this moment it seems that any sync software (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) can not do that. You can be first, and make so many people happy

[juan s.1]

+1

[Jeremy B.]

+1. Dropbox is awesome for web/app developers, but lacks the ability to ignore tmp files, or vendor folders like node_modules, bower_components, etc.

[Dave C.5]

You can exclude files (not types not wildcards) by tricking the selective sync into removing a folder of the same name as the file, and then place the file in that location.
1) rename "file.ext" "xfile.ext"
2) create folder "file.ext"
3) unsync folder "file.ext"
4) rename file "xfile.ext" "file.ext"
If you perform (4) on the cloud, the file is removed from, the machine its unsynced from
if you perform (4) on the machine its unsynced from, the file is removed from the cloud (it remains unsynced on the machine)

[Thierry M.1]

+1

[Lucas C.2]

I would also like this feature. I use SVN for most of my projects; however, for some smaller projects that I want backed up and/or synchronised between computers but don't need extensive versioning for, I use Dropbox.

I haven't found this to be much of an issue for Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Xcode projects as although they have files that don't need to be synced, they're usually quite small (although they can cause a large number of events to be logged, making it harder to find things in Events). However, Visual C++ projects can often have hundreds of megabytes of files that don’t need to be synced.

I've also had similar issues due to other applications storing temporary or other regenerable files in the same directory as files they open which are in my Dropbox. Some programs may provide an option to store these files elsewhere but not all of them.

It would also be nice if this applied to all computers (and users in the case of a shared folder) rather than having to do it for each computer like Selective Sync.

Dave C. posted a workaround for excluding a single file using Selective Sync conflicts:
https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/communities/public/questions/202362759-Is-it-possible-to-exclude-a-f...

Yours sincerely,
Lucas Cardellini

[y. taro]

please

[Geoff D.7]

+1

[luciano c.1]

+10000000000000000000000000000000000000
PLEASE!!!
this would save so much time and improve your app performances so much!

[Marie G.6]

+1000 !