My use case:

• I want to have clean checkout (no artefacts from previous build, no modified files etc)
• I want to keep some additional files/folders which are not in repository

The additional files are files which are downloaded during build. Once they are downloaded, there's no need to re-download them again. (To be more specific, I have a job which builds a vscode extension and runs tests. vscode tests automatically download vscode executable if it does not exists in specific subfolder. Becauses git cleanup is enabled it deletes the downloaded vscode and it's re-downloaded with each build).

The problem:

• multi-branch pipeline clones and checkouts directly in workspace
• there is no way to exclude some files/folders in "Clean before/after checkout" additional behaviour in multi-branch pipeline

If multi-branch could clone/checkout into a subfolder, I could keep the extra files next to the repository, and use "Clean..." on the repository - it would not affect my extra files.

If mult-branch could exclude some files/folders in "Clean...", I could download the extra files to some folder inside my repo, use "Clean..." but exclude this folder.

Is there another way?