I recently had my Proxmox host fail, so I re-installed and recovered all my VMs from backups.
I'm noticing that my file structure (this is on my NAS where Proxmox mounts it via SMB/CIFS) has some duplicate folders in it. The ones I highlighted are all empty. Is this normal? Can these be removed safely?
Without knowing a little more, it's tough to say what's going on, but I suspect when you recreated the storage, you connected it to a slightly different place from last time. What's the output of cat /etc/pve/storage.cfg? The dump, images, private, snippets, and template directories are auto-created when you assign those roles to a storage pool in the PVE Datacenter.
Seeing the content of storage.cfg and maybe mount would help get this sorted, I think.
The normal and recommended Proxmox file structure is what you've after running rm -rf /. Just move to Incus (LXD) and be done with it.
Incus provides a unified experience to deal with both LXC containers and VMs. If you’re running a modern version of Proxmox then you’re already running LXC containers so why not move to Incus that is made by the same people? Why keep dragging all of the Proxmox overhead and potencial issues?
Incus is free can be installed on any clean Debian system with little to no overhead and on the release of Debian 13 it will be included on the repositories. Another interesting advantage of Incus is that you can move containers and VMs between hosts with different base kernels and Linux distros.