
This has been a highly requested feature for years, but unfortunately still hasn’t been implemented. It would be great if it were possible to ignore all files/directories that match a specific name. If you rename a project or add a new one, you’ll need to remember to change your settings. However, you must manually hand-pick each node_modules directory for exclusion. It’s called selective sync on Dropbox and it’s also possible on Google Drive. It’s Not Possible Out-of-the-Boxīoth Dropbox and Google Drive allow you exclude specific directories.

We might also want to exclude other directories that take up a lot of space like. We want to somehow exclude these directories. It’s code you haven’t personally written that can be repopulated my running npm install. None of this code needs to be backed up either. This is because your JavaScript projects’ node_modules directories take up massive amounts of space, sometimes in the 100s of megabytes.

You might spring to use Dropbox or Google Drive, but you’ll soon notice the endless scanning of node_modules directories and the steep jump in used storage space. Or what if you simply want to hack away on a pet project that doesn’t need version control? My point is, version control should not be confused with a backup system.

However, what if you’ve coded for two days, you haven’t pushed any changes, and your laptop blows up or gets stolen? You’ve lost two days of work. You should already be using Git with most projects and should periodically be pushing changes up to a remote. It works on Mac, Linux, and hypothetically Windows. It leverages the rsync command line utility.
Goodsync google drive how to#
This guide will show you how to backup your dev projects to Dropbox or Google Drive (or any service really) while ignoring your massive node_modules directories.
