Files available in the cloud only

Hi,

 

The other day I noticed that all of my files were only in the cloud. I looked at the settings to see if something was changed, and as I expected, all sync settings were fine. I clicked on the "cloud" symbols next to the folder names, and everything was downloaded. A couple of hours later same thing. I did it again. So far I've done this 5-6 times, always with the same result; files eventually aren't physically on my drive. I looked at the space on my hard disk, thinking that Dropbox does this automatically when it senses that storage is getting low on the hard drive, but that is not the case. Anyone have any idea why this is happening?

 

Thank you!

 

MacOS Monterey 12.6