Reassess the possibility to ignore or exclude selected OneDrive folders and files from the sync process.
It would be great to be able to ignore or exclude selected files and folders within the OneDrive folder from syncing. It has been requested a few times before and solves user problems in a variety of areas: from software developers having problems with temporary build files and node_modules folders, through users who want to ignore sync problems (or issues like waiting days for a file to upload on a slow connection) by ignoring files in sync, to users who want to ignore files and folders created by applications, especially photo applications. There are many use cases where this feature would be a solution.
It might also be the case that a feature would reduce the number of support requests and user dissatisfaction, since users would have a way to fix various issues themselves (there is probably more applicable scenarios than described above) by desyncing a file or folder causing problems.
I know this feature has been requested before, and has received the status 'not right now', therefore I have termed this request 'reassess', to determine if the 'not right now' status is still the state of this feature request. I have collected the IDs of the uservoice requests for which this feature would be a solution (listed at the end of the request), summing the votes on these requests, this feature has a total of 549 votes, which would place at about the 35th position, among other requests which have status of 'working on it' or 'thinking about it'.
Thanks for your consideration!
The IDs of the related uservoice issues are: 6988070,10720758,10932591,10778649,10954851,11301837,11344905,11654178,13452462,15748891,17236724,8026992,15017205,17169314,18429295,7290507,11625105,12915153,13541754,16044514,7927728
William Clear
shared this idea
This feature has rolled out for files (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/onedrive/use-group-policy#exclude-specific-kinds-of-files-from-being-uploaded) and we are looking to expanding it to folders in the future.
339 comments
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Sunni Brock
commented
At a bare minimum, stop trying to sync desktop.ini - I hate getting this error all the time after browsing a folder from two machines.
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Roland Harrison
commented
Can we get an answer from a microsoft rep on when this will be implemented? I am considering moving back to dropbox as it drives me nuts constantly pausing and unpausing.
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Jamie Hanrahan
commented
I want to do this for certain folders on certain machines, but not all. I have about 65 GB in my OneDrive, but much of it doesn't have to be on every machine. One of my machines has only a 128 GB SSD! I want to exclude some things from being shared to that machine.
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Jeff W.
commented
Please add this feature. I want to keep all the files I use in one location. I would rather not move any files out of that directory just because OneDrive does not support or is restricted or is limited because of the characters used in the filename (which I do not want to change).
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Horia
commented
gitignore for OneDrive
Add a .onedriveignore file to the OneDrive folder (global) in which you can specify files/folder to ignore.
Do the same for subfolders.
This would allow easy syncing of Visual Studio projects for example, as currently the application just syncs non stop if you open a solution file that has it's data stored with OneDrive.
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Anonymous
commented
This is supported by every other (free) cloud service I can think of.
This one I pay for. Can you see the discrepancy?One could easily get the impression Microsoft develeopers and product managers never actually use their own products. If they did, such features would probably be implemented much more quickly.
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Anonymous
commented
Ignore hidden Mac-Files and Libreoffice is not a solution. Why does Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and all of the others not have this problem? It is not a upload problem, it is a file access and interface issue. Please join the other storage solutions with a quick fix.
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Megakoresh
commented
This is very good suggestion. There is no reason why I would have to configure every client on every machine to ignore explicit files if the whole point of OneDrive and cloud sync in general is to have a seamless experience. The file structure should be self-documenting. A gitingore-like method seems like the most sensible solution.
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Anonymous
commented
First of all, I support this idea! At least we should implement this.
Further, it would be so much better for OneDrive to just recognize ".gitignore" file, so there is no need to learn another format and keep the directories as simple as possible.
Thanks!
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Anonymous
commented
We really need this feature very much
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Mauricio Coutinho commented
This is beyond annoying ! Onedrive keeps complaining that it cannot sync .DS_Store files and chokes sync erros all the time. For a product that is supposed to be Mac aware this is unbelievable.
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Steve Hollasch
commented
I've decided today to abandon OneDrive as a way to synchronize across machines for this reason. It's not compatible with Visual Studio projects and loads my bandwidth with huge transient files.
By the way, OneDrive already has the code to ignore files: create files with names starting with "~$" — these won't sync. If you're Microsoft Office, of course, it becomes possible to get OneDrive's attention. Remember the cartoon with the Microsoft departments with guns on each other? Office has a much bigger gun than Visual Studio. :)
Digging a bit more, OneDrive also ignores files with a `.tmp` extension, and files named "thumbs.db" or "desktop.ini".
Perhaps one could exploit the hard-coded OneDrive ignores to allow users to gain control?
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Dennis J Foreman commented
Visual Studio creates machine specific files (.suo) that are machine specific and get re-created when a project is rebuilt. if a .suo changes on some OTHER machine, THAT machine thinks it has to rebuild. DUMB. No better than simple backup.
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Antonio de la Iglesia
commented
This is a much needed feature for us the developers.
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James Veitch
commented
Why can't we do something crazy and not re-invent the wheel again... Microsoft could just leverage existing patterns like that incorporated in `.gitignore` files etc.
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Darrell Plank
commented
I agree so much. As it is it's impossible to share VS projects. You'd think Microsoft's OneDrive hand would know what it's Visual Studio hand is doing, but it seems not. The .vs files don't work under the current system since they need to exist on my local machine in the project directory I want to share on OneDrive but I don't want to upload/download them. Telling OneDrive to not sync these files means "don't download them" but if they exist it still tries to improperly upload them. I want it to IGNORE them entirely but there's no option for that which makes Microsoft's VS projects impossible to store in Microsoft's OneDrive without OneDrive constantly telling you that there's an error since it "couldn't sync the .vs folder".
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Carlos JSA
commented
And folders. By extension OR name. Visual Studio $tf folders, .git, .vs, etc.
I have over 600GB of data in OneDrive and I sync a lot of stuff and projects. But some apps just like to create temporary files, folders and such that can be very large and just useless to sync. Any version of Visual Studio + TFS being TOP 1.
If you juts google for "exclude file", the first suggestion is just that. And if you look around the web it has been years people has been asking that and no satisfactory answer has been provided besides some "not right now" or "MOVE THE FILES SOMEWHERE ELSE" (sic!).
If I have to "move the files somewhere else", it means that I have to move them outside OneDrive. So… I guess moving to Amazon, Google Drive, DropBox...?
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Matthew Mueller
commented
I use the Corsair Effects Engine to sync my keyboard's lighting with my Windows accent colour. This program stores a log file in my Documents folder. OneDrive is constantly trying to sync it because, as a log file should, it is constantly being overwritten and updated. This hogs valuable bandwidth for some reason, despite the file only being 5-10 KB.
I have no means of changing where this log file is stored. This, and the horrendous hassle that is dealing with Unity projects and its Library files, lead me to BEG the devs at Microsoft to let us exclude specific folders from within the File Explorer.
Please.
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James Hildeman
commented
Exclude folders feature - so I can "expand a .zip" on one machine and use it without all the sync noise/bandwidth
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Frédéric Auberson
commented
What about MS Access "IDB" files? ".git" folders? Various temporary backup files created by editors?
This is a necessary feature, and it would be so easy to implement.
