You might see that the Dropbox Community team have been busy working on some major updates to the Community itself! So, here is some info on what’s changed, what’s staying the same and what you can expect from the Dropbox Community overall.
Forum Discussion
Feedback on the new desktop app "ignore files" feature.
@Daphne that's great news! I look forward to trying it out.
But it would also be nice to have a configuration file, like ".dropboxignore", to list paths or patterns to exclude. The reason is that e...
Yep - I am also finding these exact issues with the existing proposed solution.
Why can't I just give the Dropbox indexer patterns to ignore?! Exactly the way Megasync, pCloud, etc. make possible; this doesn't seem like rocket science.
Even if it is more complicated than I imagine, surely it is much simpler than many of the other technical feats Dropbox has accomplished in the past.
I agree, other sync services like pCloud work just fine and allow you to put in extension, filename, or folder name and just have it excluded from sync. And this needs to be implemented via a web admin so the exclusion can be done for all client computers that connect to the service. I don't want to go around to every computer and update the exclusion list everytime something changes.
Also, this is not just a developer issue. There are many, many other use cases where folders / files need to be excluded. As an example, Adobe Lightroom creates massive changes in the folders and files for a photo library catalog. The vast majority of them need to be excluded. So don't think this is just a developer issue.
Absolutely not just a developer issue. I (used) to the use the selective sync fudge to leave out machine specific files when syncing an application across mulitple devices. It worked fine and I was happy.
Now it's broken and that increase in subscription fee is looking like poor value for money.
I believe that the selective sync behaviour is determined by the local Dropbox setting somewhere. I used to have the old behaviour until I completely deleted and reinstalled Dropbox and redownloaded all my folders recently on my Mac. And selective sync never worked the same anymore. Maybe there is some setting or metadata somewhere we can set to choose this. My other Windows machine still has the old selective sync on the same folders, so it's not some global online setting.
As if all the issues web developers are facing with Dropbox is not enough, I don't think anyone has yet brought up the issue of temp files? For example, every time someone opens an Adobe InDesign file, an .IDLK file is created in the same directory (probably for file recovery), and this file is then deleted when the InDesign file is closed.
So these .IDLK files are constantly being indexed and synced with Dropbox for no reason.
So once again, we need a global ignore feature.
