move contents of dropbox to external hard drive

Hello Dropboxers @sanchez, @jayne.

Like many many other Dropbox users, I use SMARTSYNC to keep my hard drive from filling up. Nevertheless, I want to back up all my files, including those that reside ONLY in the Dropbox cloud (due to SMARTSYNC) to an external hard drive. This is best practice for data safety: true backup safety requires that my files in the Dropbox cloud, that are NOT on my computer hard drive, must be backed up on separate medium. In my case, I want them to be backed up to an external hard drive.

The question is how to do this: how can I back up all the contents of my cloud Dropbox (including those files that are Smartsynced and therefore are not present on my computer hard drive) to an external hard drive.

Please do not tell me that Dropbox has great servers and I should not worry. Please do not tell me to change the location of my Dropbox to the external drive, as that is an unworkable solution, it´s not something one can or should do periodically, and it may screw up all my SMARTSYNC settings on my computers internal hard drive. Please give me, and the rest of the community, a straight answer on how this can be done.

I also wish to note that simply going on the browser version of Dropbox and downloading everything is a terrible solution: sometimes Dropbox tells you that you're trying to download too much, sometimes it just freezes, and I'd have to select manually each and every folder to back up, every time I need to do so. Since I have about 2 TB worth of data on the Dropbox cloud, this is unwieldy.

I have to say, I am on the verge of dropping my Dropbox Professional account, switching to the free one, and moving everything somewhere else since Dropbox seems to be purposefully preventing users from effectively backing up their data to an external hard drive, for reasons I cannot fathom.

Why would anyone voluntarily engage with Dropbox, knowing how impossible they make it to disengage . . .  This is a scam.  

I dropped Dropbox Pro in favour of Google Drive due to issues with external drives. Google handles external drives much better IMO.

Audio and video professionals need to use externals, sometimes we need to unmount them for transfers etc. It would be nice to be able to do that without thinking that Dropbox is going to register all files as being deleted.

Honestly, I'd sign back up if you could work out a better solution.

http://nionsoftware.com/dbpahk/support

 Here is a portable version of DropBox. I installed it on my office computer. Works very well. After installing it on your computer and creating the DropBox folder, you can copy the program to your hard drive and start synchronization. All of your files will be transferred to your hard drive.

This is an old question and it wasn't really resolved to my satisfaction until I answered the question myself. My issue was, I wanted to download some very large files directly to a hard drive. On many sites, when you click on download, you get a navigation window asking you where you want to download the files to. Dropbox doesn't do that. It defaults to your downloads folder. Now, my computer's internal drive hasn't got much space left and it definitely can't handle downloading all the files I need to get onto the hard drive, so I need to bypass the computer altogether. The answer lies in determining what the default downloads folder is for your browser. It is usually the Downloads folder. But you can temporarily change that. Go into your browser's preferences (make sure your hard drive is connected and powered up) then change the default downloads folder to the hard drive. Now, any files or folders you click on in Dropbox will download directly to your hard drive. Once you're done, change your default downloads folder back to where you had it. Done-zo!