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.

[Johnny W.2]

I have also Tweeted it to their support. This issue already has more votes than any other previously raised issue, but more votes wouldn't hurt things!

[mym___]

+100500

[Brad B.23]

@DropboxSupport tweeted back:

Hi, thank you for following up. We did relay that Community thread to the team so that they are aware of your feedback.

[Reed T.1]

+1

Totally needed!

".git" folders ruin the could-have-been-smooth experience of syncing to dropbox!

[Johnny W.2]

I got a similar response:

Thank you for following up here. We've relayed that Community thread to the team, and we appreciate the feedback.

I wonder if there's another way we can get in touch.

Edit: I've opened a support ticket. Hopefully we can get SOME feedback from a developer in the team.

[Ed]

Hello everyone

Thanks so much for the continuous feedback on this feature. We've taken notes of your points and pain points and have passed this on internally. I encourage you to keep letting us know about things you like/dislike or would like to see differently but please not we may not reply to all comments or take immediate actions on anything. 

Thanks again,

[Johnny W.2]

Hi Ed, thanks for replying to us. It's been 10 months since this thread was created, and it remains the most popular issue raised on these forums (even not including the other highly voted threads duplicating a request for the same feature).

When do you think the internal team will make a decision on this? Right now it's actually hindering my work on a regular basis. I don't wish to create new projects in DropBox because as soon as I create a `node_modules` (a standard folder used in nearly all modern web development) I will be looking at 6000+ file uploads.

I understand that, from a business point of view, DropBox isn't interested in helping me with this problem. I appreciate that it's in your interest to get us to upload as many files as possible in the hope we will run out of space, forcing us to hand over more money to your company (I'm already a Pro customer, so I suppose that would mean Business).

It's worth noting, however, that even though `node_modules` can easily amount to 6000+ files, it typically only equates to around 20MB. There is very little gain for DropBox, and an awful lot of pain for your customers.

So can you please tell us when we are likely to see a decision made on this issue so we can decide whether or not to stay with your company.

Thanks again for your time.

Johnny

[eddie j.]

Also with Vagrant VMs, I upload hundreds of GBs per day of data I don't want to keep as it is disposable data. I create and destroy so many VMs per day, each multiple GBs that should just be ignored in all subdirectories.

I am a paying customer, but you could save yourself a lot of money in bandwidth, disk space and other resources, if I could just ignore `.vagrant` directories in all subfolders.

It just seems so crazy this hasn't been addressed and your customers (your paying customers) are screaming out for this

[Jason B.74]

This would be really helpful for me for some of the projects I work on where I want to be able to pick it up on one computer and later another without having to commit to my git repository. As it stands .node_module folders get uploaded and the paths get so long they can't be synced and dropbox freezes up. Then the computer starts getting upset. I'd be happy with it being an advanced only feature. Maybe a .dropboxignore file in the directory to set folders and files to ignore? Much the same way .gitignore works?

[Jason B.74]

Adding a .dropboxignore file as an advanced alternative to selective sync is exactly what I am looking for. I have the .node_module problem others have mentioned. In my case I can often not get it to ever sync because the file paths get too long. That ends up preventing all of my other files from syncing.