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.

[Alessandro Z.]

From the "dbignore" project readme:

Recent versions of Dropbox do not work with dbignore. I currently lack the time fix dbignore.

Looks like "dbignore" it's not a viable option. I really wish Dropbix did something to implement this functionality.

[Franco G.4]

Yes, it's not longer maintained.

This feature would be SO useful.

[Terry U.1]

Yes +1

[Chris S.137]

+1

[Mike A.26]

My dropbox spends hours at a time looking like this:

[Mike A.26]

And Activity Monitor spends a lot of time looking like this:

[Mark D.57]

An example where this is useful if not completely needed, is sharing a DropBox folder between Mac and Windows on the same machine.  I am not talking about having two instances of DropBox running--one in Windows, the other in Mac--pointing to the same folder as I have seen that completely mess up the dropbox folder with lost files and such.  I am talking about having one 'side' running the software and controlling all syncing with the service from its own Dropbox folder, then having the other side just access the folder directly as if it were any other folder shared between the Mac and Windows.  

The problem is since Mac and Windows store hidden/temp files differently, inevitably the client is syncing a bunch of things it shouldn't be.  In my case, my DropBox folder is now littered with files all starting with a period.

Specifically in my setup, I run OS X Yosemite as my primary OS so it has Dropbox set up syncing to a folder under my user's home directory.  I then run Parallels Desktop to run Windows, but thanks to shared folders, I can see my Mac user's home folders, and thus I can access the Dropbox folder from Windows.  Even when I make changes to the folder from the Windows side, the client on the Mac side, monitoring that same folder syncs all changes to the cloud.  Again, to be clear, the Windows side has no idea of anything called Dropbox. It's just accessing a shared folder from the Mac side.

The problem is because of this setup, my DropBox folder is now littered with almost double the number of files because for every actual file, there's a corresponding 'dummy' file with the same name and extension but with a leading period.   Here's an example...

.MyNotes.txt

.SomeFile.pdf

MyNotes.txt

SomeFile.pdf

The first two share the same filenames and extensions as the latter two but start with a period.

Since *I* know I'll never create a file that starts with a period, I want to exclude them from DropBox, but I can't, so instead I just have all these files littered throughout my DropBox store getting synced to *all* my machines and devices. Worse, since the file extensions are still the same, all clients think they are jpgs, pdfs, etc. and display them as bad data.

The only solution is to set up *two* dropbox stores, one on the Mac and one on Windows but that would mean I am literally doubling the storage space.

[Andrey S.2]

My solution: Switched to MEGA, removed dropbox 🙂 Profit + 50Gb Free

[Johnny W.2]

+1 PLEASE add this!!!

You could easily add this as a super-advanced feature, hidden away, but it has now become pretty much essential for my day to day.

[andre c.9]

@Andrey S.

Thanks for sharing this.
I did the same.