When excluding files or folders with selective sync (maestral exclude in the CLI), they will be removed from the local folder and kept in the cloud only. However, there also is a valid use case for excluding files from syncing which exist only in the local Dropbox directory and not in the cloud. Those could be for instance build artefacts or system files which Maestral does not already exclude by default.
As of version 0.6.2, Maestral supports excluding local files from syncing by using a ".mignore" file to specify patterns of file names to be ignored. The ".mignore" file must be saved in the top-level Dropbox folder. It uses the same syntax as gitignore files but behaves slightly differently:
- If you add a new mignore pattern, any matching files or folder will be removed from the remote Dropbox and will only exist locally.
- If you remove a pattern from mignore, you will need to pause and resume syncing to index and upload any newly included items.
- If a local file or folder is moved to an ignored path, it will be deleted from Dropbox.
- If an item is moved from an ignored path to an included one, it will be uploaded to Dropbox.
- When a file is excluded by mignore and a file with the same name is created in the cloud, the remote file may be downloaded and included in syncing temporally. However, the next time syncing is paused and resumed, it will removed from the cloud.
Warning: Currently, pattern matching is case sensitive. A pattern Foo.txt in mignore will match the file name "Foo.txt" but not "foo.txt". This may change in the future since Dropbox itself is case-insensitive. See the note about how Maestral handles case-sensitive file systems.
Warning: A long list of patterns in mignore may impact performance when Maestral is indexing a large number of local file changes.