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Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

help.dropbox.com

21–30 of 143 posts

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#21
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?

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#22

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.

I can imagine a world where a arbitrary directory is filled with gitignore, dropboxignore, googledriveignore, backblazeignore, s3ignore, rsynciginore, dotignore, ipfsignore . . . Goddamn, stop the world I want to get off

We clearly need a common standard for this:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#23

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

Recommending Syncthing kind of misses the point for many Dropbox users.

I want cloud storage that's hosted on infrastructure that's not mine, because I don't trust myself to keep it redundant and up to date, a perpetual security risk. Even if I could setup a local LAN storage device at home and keep it always on and available, it's a nuisance and I don't want it.

Even more, when accessing files, I don't necessarily want to download them locally. If I have photos or documents, I want to search them or browse them without downloading entire folders locally. And I browse files on my iPhone quite often too, I need a good iPhone app.

My only problem with Dropbox is one of security, as it misses end to end encryption, but then again, the files wouldn't be as accessible if they did that, plus personally I think encryption should be local and app specific for it to be reliable, therefore I'm encrypting (via GPG mostly) the sensitive files that I need to encrypt.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#24
post #8

That seems like an arcane solution, although I'm happy they finally added it

I think this is a perfectly good technical solution that they haven't built a modern UI for, is all. It's great that under the hood the feature will be easily scriptable using standard OS utilities.

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#28
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?

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#29

Genuine question, why do people here use Dropbox or box when Google drive is far superior?

Because it is a much more seamless experience, at least on Mac, where it is properly integrated with Finder?

Take a look at Alfred (1).

(1)https://www.alfredapp.com/

Re: Dropbox ignore file or folder in beta

#30
post #21

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?

> What are the common use case of file attributes?

CephFS (a distributed filesystem) uses them to allow users to control the layout of directories and files, ie. how they are split into chunks and what pool they are stored on; and each pool has its own replication settings.

https://docs.ceph.com/docs/mimic/cephfs/file-layouts/

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