yeah, I managed to delete the contents of both Documents and Pictures by deselecting the "Backup" option for those folders. it's not obvious that is what will happen. Sigh. Luckily I had everything still on another laptop.
I'll take some blame because Laplink PCMover warned me about the cloud stuff before I started the transfer to my new laptop which I stupidly ignored. They offer the option to create a local folder in the preamble instead of using the OneDrive location.
But as an aside, the comingling of these folders and their contents amongst multiple machines I find maddening. I guess if one starts from scratch and knows this is what will happen one can manage. but if you have a bunch of existing machines, it can be a mess unless one plans it all out and have an option to sort into different machine directories if that's what one wants.
Now I'm stuck having to manually go through everything and see what's duplicated in the cloud. Argh.
FYI. I'm using TreeSizeFree to figure out where all the files and directories actually live.