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Comment by whatever_dude | Hacker News Reader

All this and yet they still can't implement support for a .dropboxignore file

You can just place any such file outside the Dropbox directory. Doesn't seem like a big deal.

It's very frustrating if you keep your programming projects backed up through Dropbox, and want to back up the code but not gigabytes of node_modules and python virtualenvs. Not that Dropbox has any incentive to make it easier to use less space...

Isn't git or mercurial more appropriate for archiving programming projects?

For archival, yes. But it's not rare that I want to swap computer without committing WIP changes.

Wouldn't a branching do the trick?

checkout a WIP branch and push it. You can pull it on any other computer you want, keep working on it till you are comfortable enough to merge back on master/develop.

While that sort of works and I do that, it's a much more cumbersome solution.

I commit WIP code to a separate branch, change, and now if I go back to the original computer, I need to make sure to push, go back, pull again... god forbid I had done interactive rebasing or amended a commit, since it'll be all of of sync... it's just more more complicated than simply saving a file and having it reflected. "Temporary commits" should be a rare thing, not mandatory.

I end up using both git and dropbox for some projects and it mostly works, but having projects on dropbox is a mess because of node_modules, having sync running continuously because some tools/projects/IDEs will keep generating temporary files, etc.

Oh i do agree, it's cumbersome and dropbox should have .dropboxignore file. I was just suggesting a work around :)

What you're looking for is an automated backup solution. What you're using is a file syncing service. Those are not necessarily the same things.

Why not use a common git server? Why not use a dedicated backup solution? Many backup apps can store backups to Dropbox if that's what you want.

No, I do want a file-syncing service—so that I can have the same dirty git worktree on both my laptop and my desktop.

Myself, when I'm at home, I just check out the project on my desktop, use SSHFS to mount it on my laptop, edit it on my laptop or desktop as needed, and have an SSH window open from my laptop to my desktop for doing things like running npm (because that'd be way too slow if I ran it from the laptop and depended on SSHFS to sync it.)

If X11 or RDP was snappier, I'd just use my laptop as a thin client, but it's not, so I'm stuck with figuring out multi-master realtime source-code tree sync.

A similar problem obtains when using VMs, but at least there, there isn't the requirement that I have the ability to run a GUI text editor in the VM that sees changes I make outside the VM quickly enough to be unnoticeable.

here's shitty solution to your problem: https://github.com/gburca/rofs-filtered

basically, use FUSE to create an alternative view of your filesytem, but that fuse layer will also exclude certain files matching a regex. Only the FUSE view into your files should put in the Dropbox folder and synced. This particular fuse setup is read-only which was fine for my purposes, but you might need an alternative which allows write access for Dropbox.

I use SSHFS to work from home, and then X11-forwarding to run gitk/git-gui for the occasional git ops that take too long otherwise.

But for personal projects I use syncthing, which supports .stignore, gives you versioning options, and most importantly doesn't randomly revert your files back to a previous version because of clock drift.

Fyi, i have been using unison command line tool for this scenario. It is fast enough that i can edit files locally, and then have a file system watcher on my remote machine run tests when files are changed and it only adds a second or so to the process.

There are options for not syncing some files, for how to resolve conflicts, etc.

Other syncing programs (eg, Syncthing has .stignore) support this feature. It really is a wonderful feature and I'd find it hard to live without too.

If I have something in my dropbox sync folder, and then open it with a viewer or editor that creates other files beside the original in the same directory (eg. temp files, working backups, etc.), then that is a possible use for a .ignore.

When people have a problem, it's very, very frustrating for somebody to show up and disagree — as if that person couldn't figure out that he can save files outside the Dropbox directory — clearly that's not what he freaking wants and what isn't a big deal for your usage patterns might be a big deal to somebody else.

StackOverflow is filled with such answers. Which is why many people ask questions defensively, also mentioning the alternatives that they don't want to do. If I were to ask this as a StackOverflow question, I'd do it like ...

How can I make Dropbox ignore certain files from syncing? Is there some sort of .dropboxignore mechanism?

PS: I don't want to save files outside Dropbox's directory, I do want to synchronize my projects on Dropbox and lets assume for the sake of argument that I know what I'm doing.

(at which point I'd realize that I'm becoming aggressive and that I probably answered my own question, therefore closing the browser window in frustration)

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