Partial Dropbox Sync

This question is about what I will call ‘fractional’ Dropbox use.

I’ve come to depend on Dropbox for simple work that involves writing single text documents. I share among a phone, a very old Powerbook, and a modern Macbook. The latter is where things end up. I only work with plain text documents.

I want to escalate my use of Dropbox and share not just single text documents, but a whole EagleFiler project. The complication comes in:

— the project will have text documents mixed in with images and PDFs, but on the remote machines I will only be working on text documents.

— the two ‘remote’ machines (the phone and old powerbook) are vastly underpowered. In the past, large files in the Powerbook Dropbox have choked the machine. So I want to only share the text documents, but intact as EagleFiler arranges them.

I hope I have described the situation well. Is there some trick to do help with this, other than grouping all the text documents in one folder? The only possibilities I can think of are:

— some sort of alias strategy

— some setting that tells Dropbox not to sync certain files in a folder

Dropbox’s Selective Sync feature lets you choose which folders sync to each Mac. I don’t think there’s a way to filter particular files or file types, though.

Regarding the phone, my understanding is that the official Dropbox iPhone app is more of a live view than a sync, so I wouldn’t expect it to have problems here. Some other apps like GoodReader let you choose particular subfolders to sync. I think some of the text editors ignore non-text files.

I did not know of the selective sync feature. It solves my issue. Thanks.