I like the whole automatic syncing thing, but my project has a directory /data/xml/ with huge xml files (several megs per file and at least 20 of those files). That directory needs to be excluded, because it takes to long for IntelliJ to sync that directory and it also makes a refactor rename hang (if search for text occurances). However , as far as I know, there's no way to tell a pom.xml file that the ide should exclude directory's. So every time it IntelliJ syncs with the pom.xml file, it looses those excludes and a refactor rename takes ages again. Those xml files don't belong in /target because they need to be under source control (svn). They could very well be under /src/test/resources too (but not all test/resources should be excluded for refactor renames).