When you try to set up a local development environment from a drupal dump which includes just the code base and the database without the Drupal files folder you will run into the issue of missing files. Drupal would think that it still has all the files in the Drupal files folder and would create links / process images as usual. This would however lead to a lot of unexpected errors in a lot of unexpected places. If you really do not care about the content in these files and want to recreate the missing files here is how you do this.