Switching from DropBox. Can I move iCloud drive to an external thunderbolt drive.

I'm thinking of switching from Dropbox to iCloud Drive. I have a 3TB thunderbolt drive attached to my Mac. I have 25GB available on my Mac.

I'd like to store a minimum of 50GB and as much as 2TB of data on iCloud Drive but have 100% also available locally and synced with iCloud drive.

I understand how iCloud drive manages storage by removing unused/rarely used files from the local hard drive but I don't have this issue if I am allowed to move iCloud Drive locally from the Mac hard drive to an external attached drive.

I'd prefer to have the whole 2TB redundantly stored on iCloud Drive and my external drive and fully synced.

Dropbox allows me to keep the synced folder on the external drive. Does iCloud Drive?

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks---Miles