Duplicate Files in "Lightroom" folder

Hi,

I have a question for what I think is a workflow issue on my end so I am sorry if this is very basic or if this needs to be moved to a different thread.  I imported a batch of photos from my external hard drive into Lightroom Classic on my laptop and then waited for it to sync.  I was planning to edit some of the photos from my iPad because I was traveling and left my laptop at home.  When I opened up Lightroom on my iPad, I noticed that not all of the photos were populating.  Thinking that I must have somehow not selected all the photos to import the first time, I plugged in my HD into my iPad to import it again but this time into Lighroom mobile.  I did some edits, and flagged the photos I needed to flag, etc. from my iPad.  I did not open Lightroom Classic again until a couple of days ago and realized that the files were in fact imported the first time and that there are now duplicate files located in my Lightroom folder on my laptop's internal HD.

My questions are:

1. From what I can tell, there are a handful of other files that are also located in the Lightroom folder and the common theme is that they were all imported into Lightroom Mobile.  Is that correct?  I'm clearly. not familiar with the creative cloud ecosystem and ask because I am having trouble understanding how uploading via mobile would somehow duplicate the actual file that was already on my external HD into a folder on my laptop?

2. If that is correct, is there a more streamlined method of uploading from a mobile device that does not duplicate the original file?

3. I think the reason I didn't see the photos on my iPad at first is because I had a very weak and spotty wifi signal at the time so it probably needed additional time to load.  Is there a way to replace the files that are in my external HD with the ones that are located on my laptop's internal HD since those are the ones associated with the edits I made?  As a test, I tried deleting one file from the Lightroom folder so that it would force me to manually locate the file.  When I selected the one from my external HD, it said that the file was associated with another folder.  Is that because they are 2 files located in 2 different folders/drives and Lightroom isn't recognizing them as duplicates?  I'm hoping that this is a one off situation so I hope to avoid having to manually go through and pick which ones to delete and which ones not to but if that's the solution then I guess it'll be a lesson learned.

I am using Lighroom Classic v. 14.0.1 on a Macbook with macOS Sonoma v. 14.6.1

On my iPad I am using iPadOS v. 17.6.1 and Lightroom Mobile v. 10.0.1 450863/171

Thank you in advance!