from Hacker News

Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

by spectaclepiece on 1/30/20, 8:57 AM with 136 comments

by veeralpatel979 on 1/30/20, 6:35 PM
It's unfortunate that as startups get larger, the speed of improvement on their product often gets slower.
It's strange to me that Dropbox has thousands of employees, people have wanted this for a _long_ time, and yet this hasn't been built.
You'd think that with more engineering/PM/design talent the product would get better, and faster.
Anyone have any insight into why happens? I've never worked at a early stage startup but here are some hypotheses:
- Maybe this is a good thing. After a product is "done", adding more functionality makes it worse, not better.
- Maybe the company leadership's focus shifts from building a great product to scaling as fast as possible. And doing both at once isn't possible.
- Maybe the engineering division grows substantially, but the number of people actually working on the product doesn't change much. Instead the new engineers work on important, but auxiliary things, like dev tooling, security, infra, ops, etc
- Maybe developing features takes longer because there's more process: security/legal/ops needs to review it, several layers of management need to approve it, it needs to work in multiple countries, etc
- Maybe the urgency to keep improving your product disappears after you feel that you've made it
- Maybe it's more important to take longer to build stable, complete features instead of shipping as fast as possible
by spectaclepiece on 1/30/20, 9:01 AM
The most requested feature, to allow a file or folder to be ignored by Dropbox sync without using selective sync is finally in beta.
The community requested a .dropboxignore file but they chose another solution which I’m sure is reasonable for making the feature more user friendly to non-devs.
This will be immensely helpful for node_modules or build target directories.
by fyp on 1/30/20, 1:57 PM
The dropbox cli already lets you ignore folders. I've have had the following script for many years to ignore node_modules:
```
  exclude_folders=$(find . -type d -name "node_modules" | grep -v "node_modules/")
  echo "Excluding $exclude_folders"
  dropbox exclude add $exclude_folders
  dropbox exclude list
```
The feature I want is pattern-based ignore in a .dropboxignore file.
by terpua on 1/30/20, 10:02 AM
for those using google drive or onedrive, we have ignore rules which supports gitignore syntax -- https://help.insynchq.com/en/articles/3045421-ignore-rules
note: i'm a co-founder
by s9w on 1/30/20, 9:36 AM
That seems like an arcane solution, although I'm happy they finally added it
by Angostura on 1/30/20, 11:11 AM
OK, this is probably a very dumb question, but I'm trying tio understand the usecase.
I put things that I want to sync with Dropbox in /Dropbox and take out things that I don't want to sync.
Why would I want to leave things in /Dropbox that I don't want on Dropbox?
by gwbas1c on 1/30/20, 2:02 PM
I worked on a sync product that had this feature "forever." The problem with the "ignore" feature is that it creates corner cases in almost every use case we add. A huge amount of engineering resources goes into this feature, even though its only used by a minority of users.
A big problem comes with un-ignoring a file / folder, specifically if someone else has gone and added the same file / folder on another computer or in the web. The only way to make that use case work smoothly is to basically read minds, because there's no way to know which version of the file / folder is the right one.
by joeblau on 1/30/20, 2:27 PM
Could they make it work like git? Then all of the templates hosted by https://gitignore.io would work!
by bad_user on 1/30/20, 4:39 PM
Are these settings persisted on their server?
Does Dropbox know to not sync those files on a new computer, or do you have to set those settings everywhere?
If not, if this works like Selective Sync (which is a local setting), then you can end up accidentally syncing those files from new computers. And is thus not equivalent with a .gitignore.
Also does it support glob patterns?
Why couldn't they do a .gitignore that syncs along with your other Dropbox files and be done with it?
by kbumsik on 1/30/20, 10:39 AM
Interesting. It's the first time for me to see a use of file attributes in Linux. What are the common use cases of file attributes?
Also, I just notice that every files in Dropbox folder has com.dropbox.attributes key with unreadable binary value. Does anyone have an idea about this field?
by wtmt on 1/30/20, 6:03 PM
While the instructions go to a level of detail with the assumption that the person typing these commands may not be familiar with them, I don’t get why there are no instructions on this page to revert ignoring a file or folder so that it starts syncing to Dropbox again.
by karlicoss on 1/30/20, 10:03 AM
Obligatory mention of Syncthing, which had .stignore file for a while [0]. It's open source, and you can selfhost in; but the downside comparing to Dropbox is that you won't be able to access your files if your computers are off.
[0] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
by brian_herman__ on 1/30/20, 3:41 PM
It would be cool to make a file that would be globally ignored with all syncing services so it couldn't be uploaded. Though I do not think this is possible.
by azhenley on 1/30/20, 7:33 PM
I recently wrote a blog post about another feature I have been wishing Dropbox would add. Looks like it won't be happening anytime soon...
"Hey Dropbox, why can't I compare file versions like this?" http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversion...
by dkobia on 1/30/20, 11:44 PM
FYI I tried this feature out a few months ago and found it to be useless for build folders. Extended attributes (xattr) get lost everytime you recreate a file/folder - think 'build', 'node_modules' etc. Additionally Dropbox broke selective sync which is even more infuriating. All this combined means my hard drive is running all the time.
by Illniyar on 1/30/20, 1:40 PM
Will an ignored file be ignored for all devices or just my device?
That is, what if I have a file/directory in my dropbox on one device and then another device "ignores" it? would it be ignored everywhere or just in my device?
Either way seems like a recipe for a lot of problems. No wonder it took so long to get to it (and it's still in Beta).
by oscarpaz on 1/30/20, 9:09 AM
This is good to know! On Linux, Dropbox's CLI implements an 'exclude' command that you can apply to certain files/folders. But it doesn't always work. I've had issues especially with Docker volumes, that I set to ignore, but dropbox gets stalled in a endless syncing status... Hope this fixes it!
by kissgyorgy on 1/30/20, 11:43 AM
LOL I think Nextcloud has this feature for years already? Such a superior experience compared to Dropbox! I will never look back! Especially now with the next big update: Nextcloud Hub: https://nextcloud.com/
by dpcan on 1/30/20, 4:05 PM
Fantastic!!! Will definitely go back to Dropbox when this feature is available.
Recently I switched to OneDrive, also no ignore that I can find, but I'm only making extra copies of stuff in there that I want backed up to the cloud.
by rmah on 1/30/20, 3:02 PM
I have never understood why dropbox refuses to allow folders other than "Dropbox" to be sync'ed. It mystifies me and keeps me from using it.
by binichgross on 1/30/20, 3:28 PM
Well, better late than never.
by andy9775 on 1/30/20, 7:17 PM
can I do a pattern based ignore, to ignore a specific folder in all subfolders?
Dropbox//node_modules/
or similar?
by nvr219 on 1/30/20, 7:03 PM
Mazal tov
by treebornfrog on 1/30/20, 11:07 AM
Genuine question, why do people here use Dropbox or box when Google drive is far superior?
by paulcnichols on 1/30/20, 3:40 PM
Rejoice!
by dropdrive on 1/30/20, 11:19 AM
Is there any reason to use dropbox over onedrive? This feature has been in onedrive I believe since Windows 10 release? (Also onedrive has linux clients too so- I use it on Linux itself and the linux client by abraunegg supports this)