Hey Google, could you please add a .gitignore-like option to Google Drive?

Google products are awesome. Gmail, Android, and Google search engine itself. Whoever used Duckduckgo or Baidu knows how awesome Google search engine is… There’s however one thing which drives me crazy: it’s Google Drive.

In particular, the sync engine of Google Drive app. It’s far from perfect, but the worst thing is when you, as a developer, accidentally leave some node_modules inside the synced directory. Then the whole thing literally explodes. As all of the devs know node_modules directory is the heaviest object in the universe…

When Google Drive tries to sync it we can go and grab a coffee. We can grab it from the plant in South America by swimming in a canoe through the ocean, wait until it grows, pick it, bring it to the USA or Europe or wherever we live, wash the beans, burn them, design our custom coffee machine, make a coffee, and then if we’re lucky we can go back to our computer and see the sync finished.

I tried to find a solution. I found this crazy discussion for example https://superuser.com/questions/820145/google-drive-with-a-gitignore-like-option. Poor admins build some custom scripts to make symlinks to the directories which they want to exclude from syncing. Or they remove the directories before running the syncing engine.

Therefore I’d like to pray to Google itself. Please, I beg you, oh mighty – add the exclusion mechanism to the Google Drive sync app so we can exclude the directories, files, anything, just like we can simply do it with .gitignore file. I know you’re busy, I know it might take a long time, but please. It will make the world a bit better place to live. Thanks in advance, Google 🙂

Comments

  1. I totally agree with you, I’m trying to solve this problem but only google itself can make the best, built in, solution!

  2. This is being requested since 2014. Forget it. It won’t happen. Google is busy making money selling ads for youtubers making 100k+/month.

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