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.

[Brad B.23]

@Johnny: Oh, definitely. I am in total agreement there. Even if we knew it was in development, or being tested, that would quell any notions that I have of moving on to a competitor for my solutions as well.

[Johnny W.2]

I missed that earlier in the thread that someone HAS written a `.gitignore` for DropBox. 

http://konolige.com/dbignore/

It's called DBIgnore and claims to do everything we're all clamouring for. I'm going to give it a try and post back with my experiences.

EDIT: Sorry, my bad. It doesn't work 😞

dbignore is currently broken

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

[Janice C.5]

@Johnny: dbignore is broken: https://github.com/tkonolige/dbignore

Edit: missed your edit 🙂

[Johnny W.2]

Yep, it's a shame. I thought I'd missed a great solution for a moment there!

[Marco F.19]

Guys, don't forget to upvote the original post for major visibility!

[crystian ..]

Marco, you are right! I forgot it!, thanks

[Chris M.153]

So if you're working on local versions of websites that uses some CMSs that create cache files, these often don't have the right permissions to be uploaded or indexed by dropbox and it causes it to be mega slow. 

The best way to stop this is to have a .ignore file like git, also if you have local git repositories, you don't need to index the .git files in dropbox.

So need this. now. please.

[Eric W.23]

You're right Chris. And if you don't catch it right away Dropbox will hang for hours and not sync your other files. Tracking it down can be a pain too to find the offending file. 

[Ivan T.5]

+1

Yeah, this is something that we need quickly, I'm currently searching for other solution as this is not worth paying yearly 😕

Dropbox, please do something about this.

[Leonardo P.]

+100000000000