Why are downloads in Dropbox showing up as being on my hard drive?

[TuckerdogAVL]

I (in theory, as it shows it this way) have my Downloads being saved in Dropbox. I have 1Tb of space and have only used about 3.5gb. But, when I ran the Apple "look under the hood" interface, it shows I have 665gb of downloaded stuff. Ah, okay ... but here's the thing. In theory, all that is supposed to be in the dropbox downloaded Cloud and not still on the hard drive. How do I figure out what to do with this? What is actually in Dropbox cloud and what's not? Of course, Dropbox then sends me notes and popups, "do you want to do this?" Or that?" How bout I deal with this first

 

[DeltaMac]

Seems that you might want to learn more about Dropbox
If you look at DropBox help, you can see this:

Online-only explained​

If you’ve never turned on Smart Sync or set a file or folder to online-only, then all of the files and folders in the Dropbox folder on your computer are “local”. This means that they take up space both on your computer’s hard drive and in your Dropbox account and are available whether you’re online or offline.

If you set a file or folder to online-only, you’ll still see the file or folder in the Dropbox folder on your computer, but it’s just a placeholder. You can only open it if you’re connected to internet. Dropbox removes it from your computer’s hard drive, so that it only takes up space in your Dropbox account online.

Anytime you open an online-only file, Dropbox automatically changes it to be “local” again, but you can change it back to online-only at any time.

Also, look at the full article about using Dropbox Smart Sync.