Custom exclusion lists for sync (blacklist control, simple file-extension exclusion, etc.)

+1. Paid oDrive user. This is the feature I need most.

+1 from me on this - I upload a lot of photos to Amazon Cloud Drive, and I’d like to exclude videos.

Any updates on this? It’s been a year!

+1 for my support (same use case as others - want to backup my code without node_modules and similar directories). gitignore (or conceptually similar) support would be fantastic.

Hope there is an update soon on this issue.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had an update on this, is Odrive going to get this in the next 6 months? One would think that a year and a half would be long enough to develop such an important feature.
I’ve been seriously disappointed by the lack of development in Odrive over the last 2 years. I have not seen any change in the parts of the app I use and whenever I wonder how to do something, I always see that it has been added to the million mile todo list of the Odrive development team.
Can you please do something that will start rolling out these needed features?
Thank you,

Hi @brandonkeithbiggs,
Thanks for your feedback. Most new features are dependent on the next major version being released. It is a massive update and we are trying to get that out as fast as we can. Unfortunately that is taking quite a while, but it is getting closer every day.

Happy paid user, just throwing my hat in to say odrive ignore list would be a total game changer (damn stupid node_modules!).

Very much looking forward to this feature.

2 Likes

What is the status of this feature almost a year later? I would use it just for a simple exclusion of folders. I would like something like the .gitignore file. I see two ways where I would use this:

  1. To exclude all my node_modules folders
  2. To keep Odrive from scanning large backup directories I only want sinked, once, but not checked (My music library for example).

Hi @brandonkeithbiggs,
This feature is tied up in the next generation product. I can’t give a delivery date for the software, but we are nearing preview/beta stage.

As the one who at least indirectly prompted creation of this thread nearly two years ago, I certainly see the impatience in awaiting what should be an important feature. Speaking of features, it does indeed appear that odrive development quickly stagnated after a promising start. I still pay the subscription simply because it allows me to easily access a variety of storage buckets from my laptop.

I originally saw odrive as a potential gamechanger for smaller companies such as ours that utilize huge amounts of cloud storage, require zero-knowledge encryption, and need team ability to share data. If odrive once again starts innovating, there may yet be opportunity. Otherwise, Google is making serious headway into this area with Dropbox not far behind. Of course, that locks you in to one cloud provider - a problem odrive was designed to circumvent.

1 Like

Hi,

Just installed odrive on my system and had a need for excluding sub-folders. That brought me to this thread. Going through it, I guess this is a feature that’s been in the works for quite some time now.

However, during my trial period with odrive, I ran into a snag, which I believe can be used to provide a workaround solution to the subfolder exclusion issue — basically, add a broken symlink within all the sub-folders that you’d like to have ignored.

So, if you have a folder do-not-sync within a folder documents, simply run a command like so from within the do-not-sync folder:

$ ln -s odrive-ignored not-a-folder

odrive will automatically ignore this folder while syncing the rest of it.

Hope this helps

1 Like

My apologies for not updating this thread sooner…

We added an advanced Premium feature to the product a little while ago that can be used to add items to our global ignore list.

Documentation for this feature can be found here: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#section--custom-ignore-list-blacklist-

1 Like

Do you have a link to more documentation on this? I don’t see .git included, are there matches hardcoded elsewhere? If there is other pattern matching going on shouldn’t it be consolidated somewhere like defaults + user added? I’d like to ignore all .git, .awssam, htmlcov, __pycache__, node_modules folders and children. Or I’d like to follow any files/paths listed in an .gitignore for that path’s children.

What is the behavior for files that will now be ignored, will they be purged?

How does this handle symlinks?

Hi @aaron.caito,
Here is the list of hardcoded items that are blacklisted/ignored: https://docs.odrive.com/docs/sync-changes#section--ignore-list-

The hardcoded items cannot be changed.

When you add an item to the custom blacklist it will be ignored by odrive. Essentially odrive just doesn’t see it, so it will not perform any operations on that object.

We don’t officially support symlinks, so this has not been tested, but odrive follows symlinks, in general.

@Tony
Thanks for updating the docs thats helpful. You mention that adding to blacklist makes odrive ignore these items. What happens to all the items that have already been uploaded to cloud, will those be removed or has odrive now forgotten about them?

Hi @aaron.caito,
The items will stay as they are. odrive doesn’t really acknowledge them at all, essentially. You’ll notice that there will be no more badges, and no more context menu options on the items that are blacklisted.

I suggest giving it a shot with a set of test data to see how it behaves.

Thank you for the explanation and the documentation update. Is it possible to change the exclusion lists with Linux?

Hi @christophe,
The next release of the agent will offer the same feature. I will make sure to ping this thread when it is ready. I expect it should be out by next week.

Thanks @Tony
That’s very good news!
I suggest that the .directory file should be excluded by default :grinning:

Christophe

1 Like

Hi @christophe,
The new odrive agent has been released: