5 Local Files You Should Never Let Cloud Sync Touch

You set up Dropbox or OneDrive to sync your home folder, thinking all your work would be safely backed up. A week later, your Node project won't build, your virtual environment is broken, and your IDE keeps crashing. Some files were never meant to be synced. Why syncing everything is a bad default Cloud sync services are built for documents, spreadsheets, and photos — files that change infrequently and exist as single units. Developer projects are different. They contain thousands of interdependent files that change in bursts. When a sync client grabs half-written files or creates conflict copies inside tightly-coupled directories, things break in ways that are hard to debug. Here are five local file types that cloud sync should never touch. 1. node_modules — the 200,000 file trap A typical node_modules folder contains tens of thousands of files. Syncing them wastes bandwidth, slows your computer, and creates phantom conflicts. Worse, some packages include platform-specific binaries th