The right way of archiving a project?

I have graded a feature-film last year. I worked on the grade way before editing was finished and picture-lock took a while, so I had all the camera-footage on my media drive so that I could swap or replace a shot easily if need be and believe me that need did arise.
Now that the film has been released and final tweaks are done I wanted to archive the project off my main Raid to a backup location. There is no need for me to keep all the camera-footage that is not used in the cut, because it's backed-up elsewere but I want to archive all the media that's in the cut to be able to quickly change something should the need arise.
In order to do that I followed the steps outlined in the DaVinci 11 Manual (November 2014 Edition) on page 381.

- Consolidated all the clips used in the Timeline to an external location, preserving the directory-structure. (I consolidated the whole source clips and did not trim them.)
- Saved the Project under a new File-Name
- Removed all the clips from the media pool
- Right-clicked the sequence in the Edit/Timelines view and did Import > Additional Clips With Tight Filename Match
- The timeline was now referring the the consolidated files at the backup-location, but all the grades were removed from the timeline.

I solved that bay using color-trace and used the timeline still pointing to the original media-files as a source and thus was able to put back all the grades on my timeline pointing to the archived media, but I doubt that was the correct way of doing this. Had I not saved a copy of the project before I removed all the clips from the timeline, I would have lost my grades for good.
It seems removing the clips from the media-pool also removed their grades even though the timeline was still in the project.
How do I correctly do what I did in the future?

cheers

Florian

There's some good info on this in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=28453

I wouldn't worry too much about archiving the Resolve session. After a few years, Resolve might not be able to open it. It's nice to have, though, if you need to return to it in the near future. I wouldn't use ColorTrace to create the archived project, just in case it doesn't do it perfectly. Just keep the original project file that was used to render out the feature. Archiving the elements in two locations on two different formats is the most important part. When movies are restored, they usually color correct from scratch for highest quality with the previously approved version for color reference.