Freeing up local storage

Hi everyone,

I know this is a well worn out theme, but I'm struggling to find the right solution.

I have been making backups of my photos on an external disk by exporting in batches (annual) for LR to the external drive.  All is working ok, except that it also mades copies on my laptop SSD which is now filling up. Presumably it needs to do this when downloading from the cloud?

In preferences there is no reference to this storage that I can find

I have found the copies from showing contents in of the Lightroom.library.lrlibrary/another folder/originals.

do I get rid of these just be manually removing?

am I making a backup of my online library the correct way?

many thanks for any help in advance.

christian