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Comment by ruffrey | Hacker News Reader

I wish they would add something like a .dropboxignore file. It's unusable for software development otherwise. It could be extremely useful.

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Yeah! I have symlinks to some directories, but I don't necessarily want to sync _all_ files in those directories. I think we're probably the 1% use-case for this though. However, you'd think some dev over at Dropbox would add this feature to scratch his own itch...

You and me both. Heck, I posted the same request in this discussion as a snarky comment.

It's kind of baffling to me that people have been asking for this feature for years, with requests [1] having hundreds of comments and upvotes on their site, and it's still ignored. "Selective sync" is a very poor substitute.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...

It's not Dropbox, but SyncThing does support a `.stignore` file.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

What is the problem? Constantly uploading to the cloud every build?

I think it could be annoying to have Dropbox sync things like binaries or temp files. Some builds could generate hundreds of artifacts that are short lived or unwanted in the long run. As it works now, Dropbox would see all of these files and burn up your network (and some CPU) copying them to the cloud, which in turn copies them to your other computers, phones, iPads, etc.

Files on phones and iPads are only download on demand. They're certainly not stored locally.

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