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.

[teewuane]

Why is this not a thing yet?

I would love to go into the web interface, right click on a folder and check a box that is "Do not sync by default". That means when I install dropbox on a new computer, it does not start syncing that folder automatically, I have to go into the selective sync options and manually select it. Or, if I add a new folder to the root of my dropbox, I don't want it to automatically sync to all of my computers.

[siugar]

I also need this feature to ignore the file I need update. Maybe it is fine to add a ignore list for me to prevent from updating the garbage to the dropbox.com. It doesn't make sense to me to update all data from the server and half of the data is garbage. The point is there is not a effectient  way to filter the files (like .obj, and some tempoary files from visual studio) which I don't want to upload. I feel it's not friendly to the havey user. I have pay the annual fee for severy years. I think dropbox is very good except lacking this feature. I need this feature so much OR I am looking for another choice for syncing the files.

[Jhn]

I signed up just to add to this request, it's disheartening to see how bad db team is listening! This would make db so much more useful.

[Rodd]

WE SHOULD BOYCOTT Drop box until they add this such simple thing!

[PhotonWarrior]

This is a MUST have feature, ADD IT NOW!

[Arne1]

It is basically impossible to put any development projects in  Dropbox, since most IDEs change a lot of files (caches/indexes etc) as soon as you jost open themm. It can't be that hard to add an option to ignore files or folders with a pattern (like .cache, .git etc).

[Omri A.]

wwwiz, my guess is that they are not adding this so that dropbox will continue to use more (not really needed) space = users will be forced to pay money and upgrade their accounts.

[teewuane]

I highly doubt that is the case. It most likely just doesn’t make sense financially for them because of the amount of work it would take due to technical reasons we don’t know about. That being said... this is getting a bit sad that they haven’t responded yet. 😕

[Omri A.]

They are already ignoring folders. They call it "selective sync".

The only needed difference is that they will not DELETE THE CONTENT of the local folder when selecting it.

They could EASILY add this checkbox and do an IF statement to decide if they should delete the content of the local folder or not.

They simply do not care, and/or (as my guess) have a financial interest to keep it that way.

[Johnny W.2]

@Travis M.7 It's definitely not an insurmountable technical nightmare. They already have the selective sync option, and this would just be an extension of that. I'm not saying there wouldn't be complications, and that it wouldn't require thought to ensure it was done correctly and not interfere with the selective sync options, but 2.5+ years is more than enough time to implement the most requested feature on their forums.

Considering this is an "advanced" feature, used by developers, it doesn't even need to be very pretty.

Their reasons are definitely not purely technical, and financial seems the next most likely option.