If I backup Dropbox on an external, does it keep the my Dropbox files that are locally?

Hey andrea52, welcome to our Community! 

You mentioned making a backup of Dropbox to an external drive. Would you mind clarifying how you'd like to achieve that? 

Would you copy the Dropbox folder, and then place its content inside your external hard drive? If not, feel free to clarify. I'm asking, to get the gist of what you'd like to achieve here. 

If you'd choose to do it the way I mentioned above, it would then backup all the content that currently exists inside your Dropbox folder locally. 

If any of the content has been removed by selective sync for instance, then you'd need to download these folders locally first. 

Keep me posted!

Thank you Megan, 

I will attach an external hard drive to my Mac and then copy the entire local dropbox folder to that external hard drive. The issue I have is that there are a lot of files on my local dropbox that are not downloaded (they have a cloud next to them) to the local hard drive. If I click on them they then download them to the local hard drive. If I do a complete copy of the dropbox onto an external hard drive I am assuming that those files (that have a cloud next to them) will not copy over? I have the preferences correct and everything I save directly to dropbox does not have a cloud but I have someone else who shares a folder with me (they have a separate account) and her files are the ones that have the cloud next to them.

Hey andrea52, awesome, thanks for the explanation!

Essentially, the content will copy from the Dropbox folder, to the external hard drive.

However, online-only files aren't fully downloaded as actual files, it's the placeholders of the file. That means that you could copy them over, but it's not certain that they would preview correctly when you try to open them directly from your external drive. 

Thank you for the response. We both have our dropbox folders marked as "available offline" so not sure why when we each save documents to a shared folder it doesn't download automatically it still shows with the cloud. Are we doing something wrong?

Hey andrea52, is the file itself available offline? 

Would you mind sending over a couple of screenshots, in order for me to have a visual? 

unfortunately due to privacy issues I can't screenshot to a public community like this. Do you have a email I can use since you work for dropbox?

Hi andrea52, could you contact the support team directly for them to assist further on this matter?