If you don’t want Resilio Connect Agents to track some files in your sync folder, please use IgnoreList. IgnoreList is located in the hidden ".sync" folder.
It is a UTF-8 encoded .txt file that allows you to specify single files, paths or rules for ignoring during the synchronization job. Each line of the IgnoreList file represents a separate rule. All the files that fall under the ignore filter are not indexed and not counted in the “Size” column in folder details on the Management Console.
Ignoring files and folders
Please note: IgnoreList is case sensitive!
Wildcards
IgnoreList supports ‘?’ and ‘*‘ wildcard symbols.
‘?’ substitutes any single character in a filename
‘*’ substitutes a string of several (any number) characters in a filename
For example, an IgnoreList containing the following entries:
*.pdf
abc?.txt
will force to ignore all the .pdf files in the share, as well as all .txt files starting with ‘abc’, followed by a letter.
Paths
Each line in the ignore list can represent both a directory and a file. For example, this line:
MyTest
will force Agents to ignore all the files called “MyTest”, as well as all the directories called “MyTest”, including their content and all subdirectories.
If an ignore filter consists of 2 components, it will be applied to the root of a sync folder. For example:
ABC\CDE
will ignore subfolder “CDE" of “ABC" which is located only in the root of a sync folder. The folder "123\ABC\CDE" will not be ignored.
Another example:
FOO\*
FOO2\*.txt
will ignore all files in the subfolder folder named “FOO” located in the root of sync share, and all pdf files in FOO2 subfolder. If you want to ignore all the "FOO" and"FOO2" folders including the ones deeper than the root level, you’ll need to add a line "FOO".
The second component can have zero length, which means that presence of a delimiter character in a filter also forces the filter to be applied to the root sync folder. For example:
\FOO
will force Sync to ignore a “FOO” folder only in the root sync directory.
EXAMPLE
With the above mentioned ignore lines, the following folder stricture will behave this way
\ABC //wil be synced
CDE //will not be synced, ignored by ABC\CDE
\123 //will be synced
ABC //will be synced
CDE //will be synced
Filename.pdf //will not be synced, ignored by *.pdf
\FOO //will not be synced, ignored by FOO\*
QWER //will not be synced
Delimiters
When composing a filter consisting of 2 or more components, note that path delimiters are OS-dependent and not universal. So please do not forget to use “/“ for Mac and unix-based OSes, while for Windows OSes use “\”.
Note: the IgnoreList is applied to the folder where it is contained and its subfolders. It will not work with the files that have already been synced.
Timings and delays
Once Agent has scanned and indexed the directory tree of a sync folder, all the structural info is going to be stored in its database and always passed to other peers (until you disconnect the sync folder).
It means that if you create or edit your IgnoreList file after the directory is added to an Agent, the folder structure will always be fully synced, however, actual files / folders added to the ignore list will not be passed to other agents.
Resilio Connect re-reads IgnoreList every time it is changed or, if system notifications are not coming for some reason, every Rescan interval. We recommend to restart Agents if you want to apply changes in the IgnoreList immediately.
Whitelisting files and folders
Whitelisting works in a similar manner as ignoring (i.e. all filters are added in IgnoreList file and with the same rules), although you need to comply one simple rule: whitelist rules must start with "!" symbol (no quotes). Whitelist rules are always of higher priority than exclude rules, so their position in the list does not matter.
Therefore, if one want's to create pure whitelist, the first (ignore) filter should be all files (*) followed by a number of whitelist filters starting with "!". For example, the whitelist allowing only synchronization of PDF files should look like:
*
!*.pdf