Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

After upgrading to macOS Catalina, you may be surprised to discover a shortcut on your Mac’s desktop to a Relocated Items folder that wasn’t there previously. The generation of this folder is actually normal behavior when upgrading an older version of macOS to Catalina, but we’re highlighting it in this article because a lot of users are confused about why the folder exists and what to do with its contents.

Happened to me. Made my way through a bumpy Catalina install, then encountered this brand new folder shortcut on my desktop.

One key takeaway:

The Relocated Items folder you see on the Desktop is just a shortcut that can be safely deleted. Doing so will not remove the folder or its contents from your hard disk. You can find the actual folder in /Users/Shared/Relocated Items.

But if you’ve done the Catalina install, worth spending a minute reading Tim’s explainer.