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.

[Edward H.21]

+1

[Daniel C.80]

Adding this feature would let me upgrade to the Pro tier, as I can put all of my development projects in here and share them between my desktop and laptop. At the moment I'm manually copying changes over from one to the other, as I wouldn't want to sync all of the temp files and JARs that get created during normal development. 

[Fabian Z.]

+1

[Colin M.19]

Will be moving away from dropbox because of the lack of this feature. Totally unusable because of this.

[Alin S.]

+1

@Colin M. - where do you move ?

[Josh E.5]

I moved to Seafile. I wrote a guide to set up it since it took me far too long to get everything configured

https://medium.com/@jeaber_44883/how-to-set-up-a-seafile-server-on-a-raspberry-pi-complete-b7c90ea17...

[Jason B.74]

I put in a message to Dropbox support requesting this and linking to this thread so they can see the interest.

[Ed]

Hi all

Thanks for all inputs and feedback on this request. This has been noted before (we don't always reply to threads here) and this has been passed on to our dev team.

[Johnny W.2]

Hi Ed, are the dev team aware how much this feature is being requested?

Everyone else: Don't forget to Upvote the original post in this thread to increase the number of votes this issue has!

[Stefano Valicch1]

Thank you for considering it.

Syncing folders like "node_modules" and such is an hassle and make working on distributed code quite impossible. Some of these folders are deep nested. Reading files with the same syntax as .gitignore would be a straightforward and powerful way to manage it.