Title: Do not checkout certain file types in TortoiseSVN
Tags: svn;tortoisesvn;svnignore
Question: I've read a lot of instruction on how to ignore files/folders in TortoiseSVN, but they all seem to address the situation of you committing something, and wanting to exclude items from that commit.
My problem is, I want to prevent certain file types from being downloaded during updates.
There are certain files that are only of interest to our art department (and, unfortunately, they're huge), which I don't want to clutter my harddrive with. But other files, in the same tree, I do need (so I cannot just exclude a whole branch).
So, is there a way to prevent certain extensions from being downloaded in the first place?

Comment: If your files are distinguishable by directory you can do a [sparse checkout/update](http://svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.8/svn.advanced.sparsedirs.html). But that mechanism does not allow for selection by extension.


Here is another answer: You can't ignore certain extensions, but if all of the art files you want to ignore are in a single folder you can ignore the entire folder hierarchy. The only way I know how to do this is by creating a new checkout though.

In the checkout dialog there is a button that says "Choose items...", which opens a simplified repo browser dialog wherein you can choose exactly which folders and files are checked out. Every time you update it will not pick up anything that you leave unchecked in this dialog. So if you want to ignore all art in the "art" folder you would leave that folder unchecked so that the existing files are not checked out. Anything that gets added in the future will be ignored as well so you have to be absolutely sure you don't want anything that might get added later.


Here is another answer: It appears that SVN doesn't provide a method for ignoring versioned files during a checkout/update. 

Here is a quote from: http://tortoisesvn.net/docs/release/TortoiseSVN_en/tsvn-dug-ignore.html
Ignoring Versioned Items
Versioned files and folders can never be ignored - that's a feature of Subversion. If you versioned a file by mistake, read the section called “Ignore files which are already versioned” for instructions on how to “unversion” it.

Now a suggestion would be to structure your checkout in a way that you can more selectively do an SVN checkout that doesn't contain the files that clutter the hard drive. 

For instance --

repo structure:


/artProjectA/clientFiles
/artProjectA/adminFiles


So then,


For user's machine checkout: /artProject/clientFiles
For your machine checkout: /artProject/


Hope this helps.

Comment for this answer: Well, a restructuring is not gonna happen.
We got about 200GBs worth of data, and nearly 100 people accessing it. So they're not going to shuffle everything around, just because I want to save some harddrive space... ;)

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