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I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used.

I would love for them to implement:

- The ability to exclude folders from syncing - useful for .venv etc

- The ability to sync folders outside of the dropbox folder

- Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html



> They still have the best sync engine[...]

If you mean differential sync (or "delta sync"), Google Drive added it this year and OneDrive added it a few years ago. Google Drive's client is much worse than Dropbox's, though, with it just randomly breaking on Windows often. I've had good experiences with OneDrive on Windows & macOS, though.


According to this post a dropbox employee made on the dropbox subreddit, excluding things from syncing may be coming soon https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/1mc86hi/cut_the_cl...


If you’re open to third-party sync clients, Maestral supports this:

https://maestral.app/docs/mignore

I’ve been loving Maestral so far, it’s just the syncing, none of the other stuff. It has some downsides (it can’t upload symlinks but it can download them, and it doesn’t have LAN sync) but it’s super lightweight.


AFAIK Maestral doesn’t have block level diff and sync which is the main reason (for me) to use Dropbox: their superior sync engine

I have Maestral (and rclone) running on my raspbi but wouldn’t use it for things like sparsebundle syncing


> Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html

I made a plugin that make this possible from the Filestash client (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). If you navigate to /public/{shareID}/ you will see your site




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