2021 PSE Catalog Structure Messed Up - Follow Up

Ron,

I'll skip long explanations about what has happened because that will not help towards a solution... and because I don't know how the Dell Transfer works and your situation relative to the OneDrive folder.

What would I do now?

The OneDrive folder may be used if you decide to 'Sync' your documents and/or Pictures from your computer to the Microsoft Cloud. You set up the service, and the 'OneDrive' folder becomes a special folder managed by Windows to mirror all changes between computer and Cloud. It's not clear in your transfer history if the 'OneDrive' folder is really active for syncing now. If you don't want to use the feature now, you would have to verify it's not active and that nothing is mirrored to the cloud.

My suggestion now is to do a full backup of the present situation.

Then you need to decide where to store your catalog and files trees for the restore process.

Either you have enough free space on your computer (internal drives) or you opt to keep your library (catalog and files) on a dedicated external drive (temporarily or definitively).

You create your own master folder just under the top level, for instance C :/My private library.

Restore by specifying that folder as the restore destination, preferably ticking the option to keep the same folder structure.

The original catalog and tree structure will remain (still messed) as it is and a distinct installation and catalog will be available with about the same look and structure, but outside of the system 'User' or 'OneDrive' folders.

You'll have first to clean up the useless empty folders in the hierarchy as it seems you have already done, from the organizer obviously.

And you'll have to remove the old messed folder trees and the old catalog as well as the content of your OneDrive system folder.

1.  You must have two user accounts on your computer.  (Or else, you somehow copied the file structure over from one computer to another.)

2.  The OneDrive folder is an OS issue.  Take a look at this Microsoft article to determine how you want to handle it.