What would cause the home dir to copy itself into itself..?
It's not the first time it happened either. Once was on Debian and this one was on MX Linux.
The only thing I can think of was a screwed backup this time but...

Do you have a second drive? I’ve had that happen when I set one up for extra storage a couple years ago

I've had that happen before when an rsync command for uploading backups was doing shenanigans. I think, it choked on a very large folder, but I just excluded that folder and then it was fine.

Yes...external USB just for my backups.

Might be duplicating OR symlinking your backup drive to your primary folder then? If you’re using an imaging/backup program I’d check those settings

I like to backup Home separate from the system on another partition (for speed) then I copy it to an external drive.
I use Lucky Backup which runs on rsync if memory serves me right.

I use Lucky Backup so I'll check that.
Weird though because I used it before and nothing stupid happened...
Thanks much

Hmm, in my case, it was certainly part of the problem that I tried to back up directly to an SMB share. It wouldn't complete even after hours, and my best guess is that it somehow created the copy in/of the home-directory when the connection failed.

Check history and see I'd you ran a copy /home to ./ while in home. Or an Rsync command with the trailing vs no trailing slash